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| Collage by Christina Fez-Barringten |
By Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com
email: bariefezbarringten@gmail.com
Abstract:
My previous monographs justifying architecture as the making
of metaphors (C) were steeped in deductive formal reasoning since we could not find
new research about metaphors. Many of my monographs included analyzing and
explaining the syllogism:
- Art [F] is the making of metaphors
- Architecture is an art[F]
- Therefore architecture is the making of
metaphors.
Till now we did nothing to informally reason why art is the making of metaphors nor why
architecture is an art. Since 1967 I proceeded
to analyze the presumptions and find its many applications. This new
information in Metaphor and Thought
by Andrew Ortony first published in 1979, evidence to support inductive
reasoning and to this end each axiom is its own warrant to the inferences of
the above syllogism and the answer to questions of why metaphor is the stasis
to any of the syllogism’s claims and implications. This argument now assumes
that what is true for the parts is true for whole, where any one axiom is true
the claim is true and the collective axioms and claims support the resolution
that architecture is the making of metaphors.
While aesthetics is a guiding principle in matters of artistic [F]
beauty and taste, metaphor is the analogy to taste and is used to form
works of art and architecture.
William Wilson said that "a generous Age of Aquarius aesthetic that said that everything
was art” It was during this time that we conceived the theory (architecture
is an art because it makes metaphors) and held the lecture series at Yale. Most
definitions of aesthetics concern
the appreciation of beauty or good taste including the basis for making such
judgments. Without a theory of metaphors these judgments mostly deal with
probability and are inductive or deductive, deductive when depending on
accepted premises which is the commonplace of the metaphor or inductive using
logical induction. Inductive reasoning is inductive inference from the observed
to the unobserved. It was given its classic formulation by David Hume,
who noted that such inferences typically rely on the assumption that the future
will resemble the past, or on the assumption that events of a certain type are
necessarily connected, via a relation of causation, to events of another type.
In argumentation [A] it is noted that in an induction there is no new
information added. In both methods the
metaphor is at their root and as such the basis of aesthetics and as such
essential to understand the stasis to what makes all arts the making of
metaphors and how that Wilson’s statement is true for everything as most are
metaphorical as well. The matter then is
one of standards, social rightness and the ability any one or another work has
an explanation of its form.
Architecture as the making of metaphors not only is the stasis
to why architecture is art but also explains the formation of architectural aesthetic
vocabulary.
The below is predominantly developed from a study of “Metaphors and Thought” by Andrew Ortony, [1] and, is in addition to over forty years of my work
about “architecture as the making of metaphors. It is my hope that this
monograph will introduce to aesthetics an architectural vocabulary to appreciate
works of architecture.
Key Words (53):
metaphor, architecture, art [F] , aesthetics, parte, generative metaphor,
carrying –over, top-down, renaissance, reasoning,
concept, conduit metaphor, dead metaphor, conduit, novel images, image
metaphors, abstract concepts, perform
abstract reasoning, conceptual system, onomatopoeic metaphors, mapping, invariance principle,
emphatics, surrogates, micro, macro, direct, indirect, deductive, inductive,
appreciation, commonplace reasoning, prototype theory, gestalt,
inexpressibility thesis, vividness thesis, mnemonic
Biographical note: (88 words)
Columbia University coursework in behavioral psychology
under Ralph Hefferline and others in voice Linguistics, Bachelor’s of Fine Arts
from Pratt Institute and Master of Architecture from Yale University where I
was mentored in metaphors and metaphysics by Dr. Paul Weiss. For research I
founded the New York City not-for–profit corporation called Laboratories for
Metaphoric Environments.
In addition to authoring over fifteen published monographs
by learned journals I have spent 20 years in Saudi Arabia and have written a
book containing pen and ink drawings on perceptions of 72 European cities.
Institutional affiliation:
Global University ;American Institute
of Architects; Florida Licensed Architect; Programming Chairperson for the Gulf
Coast Writers Association; National Council of Architectural Registration
Boards; Al-Umran association, American Society of Interior Designers; and
founding president of Architects International Group/ Mid East.
Axiom’s contextual
forms
Three levels of axioms matching three levels of disciplines:
- Multidiscipline: Macro most general where the metaphors and axioms and metaphors used by the widest and diverse disciplines, users and societies. All of society, crossing culture, disciplines, professions, industrialist arts and fields as mathematics and interdisciplinary vocabulary.
- Interdisciplinary: Between art fields Where as metaphors in general inhabit all these axioms drive a wide variety and aid in associations, interdisciplinary contributions and conversations about board fields not necessary involved with a particular project but if about a project about all context including city plan, land use, institutions, culture and site selection, site planning and potential neighborhood and institutional involvement.
- Micro Discipline: Between architects and all design professionals involved in making the built environment particularly on single projects in voting relevant arts, crafts, manufactures, engineers, sub-con tractors and contractors. As well as owners, users, neighbors, governments agencies, planning boards and town councils.
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| Collage from "Legend"by Christina Fez-Barringten |
Axioms:
Axioms (shown in Roman numerals) are
self-evident principles that I have derived out of Ortony’s Metaphor and Thought[1.0] and accept as
true without proof as the basis for future arguments; a postulates or
inferences including their warrants
(which I have footnoted as 1._._ throughout).These axioms are in themselves clarification, enlightenment,
and illumination
removing ambiguity where the derivative reference (Ortony) has many applications. Hopefully, these can
be starting points from which other statements can be logically derived.
Unlike theorems, axioms cannot be derived by principles of
deduction as I wrote: "The metametaphor theorem" published by Architectural
Scientific Journal, Vol. No. 8; 1994 Beirut Arab University. The
below axioms define properties for the domain of a specific
theory which evolved out of the stasis defending architecture as an art and in that
sense, a” postulate" and "assumption" . Thusly, I presume
to axiomatize a system of knowledge to show that these claims can be derived
from a small, well-understood set of sentences (the axioms). “Universality,
Global uniqueness,
Sameness,
Identity,
and Identity abuse”
are just some of the axioms of web architecture. Francis Hsu of Rutgers writes that “Software Architecture Axioms is a worthy
goal. First, let's be clear that software axioms are not necessarily
mathematical in nature”.
Furthermore, in his book titled The
Book of Architecture Axioms Gavin
Terrill wrote: “Don't put your
resume ahead of the requirements Simplify essential
complexity; diminish accidental complexity; You're negotiating
more often than you think ;It's never too
early to think about performance and resiliency testing; Fight repetition;
Don't Control, but
Observe and Architect as
Janitor”. In “Axiomatic design
in the customizing home building industry published by Engineering, Construction
and Architectural Management; 2002;vol 9; issue 4;page
318-324 Kurt Psilander wrote that “the developer would
find a tool very useful that systematically and reliably analyses customer
taste in terms of functional requirements (FRs). Such a tool increases the
reliability of the procedure the entrepreneur applies to chisel out a concrete
project description based on a vision of the tastes of a specific group of
customers. It also ensures that future agents do not distort the developer's
specified FRs when design parameters are selected for the realization of the
project. Axiomatic design is one method to support such a procedure. This tool
was developed for the manufacturing industry but is applied here in the housing
sector. Some hypothetical examples are presented”. Aside from
building-architect’s axioms directing that “form follows function”; follow
manufacturers requirements and local codes and ordinances, AIA standards for
professional practice architectural axioms are few and far between.
I. Introduction:
Arnold Berlant’s website states that: “Sense perception lies at the
etymological (history of words) core of aesthetics (Gr. aesthesis, perception by the senses), and is central to
aesthetic theory, aesthetic experience, and their applications. Berlant finds
in the aesthetic a source, a sign, and a standard of human value”.
It is this human value which is one
leg of the art metaphor and the very basis for my view that metaphor is the
foundation for both art, architecture and aesthetics, and why I have spent the
past forty years researching the stasis to architecture being an art (because
it too makes metaphors) it can also be shown that this same stasis is the
commonplace to the works of aesthetic thought and investigation. . This coincidence
confirms the intrinsic nature of my study of epistemology of architecture is a
study in aesthetics. The metaphoric evidence I believe will prove both useful
to the creation, teaching and valuation of works of art [F] as well as their architectural
off-spring. In fact metaphor is the driving parte
for most creative art and orchestral works.
Some contemporary
aesthetic theory differs with how best to define the term
“art”, What should we judge when we judge art?, What should art be like?, The value of art, things of
value which define humanity itself; contrasted to Raymond Williams
who argues that there is no unique aesthetic object but a continuum of cultural
forms from ordinary speech to experiences that are signaled as art [F]
by a frame, institution or special event. Conversations about aesthetics,
metaphors and architecture reassess current and traditional issues by providing
a scientific method for the way metaphors work in architecture.
The commonality of all arts [F]
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 [F] is not expressed as a linguistic metaphor all arts are metaphoric.
Likewise, if architecture is the making of metaphors what are the linguistic, psychological,
and cognition science’s commonalities between architecture and metaphors? This
monograph is linguistic analogy transferring from linguistic, psychological and
cognitive fields to art and architecture what has been scientifically studied.
This is the “stasis” (the state of
equilibrium {equipoise} or inactivity
caused by opposing equal forces) of the controversy of architecture being an
art; that if architecture behaves, acts, looks and works like art than it too
must be an art. [F] 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?
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.
In 1967, during the series of
colloquia [2] at Yale on art, Irving Kriesberg [3] had spoken about the characteristics of painting
(art) as a metaphor. It seemed at once that this observation was applicable to architecture
(since scholars have long proclaimed that architecture was an art) and to the design
of occupiable forms. An appeal to Paul Weiss drew from him the suggestion that
we turn to English language and literature in order to develop a comprehensive,
specific, and therefore usable definition of metaphor. But it soon became
evident that the term was being defined through examples without explaining the
phenomenon of the metaphor; for our purposes it would be essential to have
evidence of the practical utility of the idea embodies in the metaphor as well
as obvious physical examples.
However, since then, in 1977, a
group of leading philosophers, psychologist, linguists, and educators gathered
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to participate in a multi
disciplinary conference on metaphor and thought which was attended by nearly a
thousand people. Our symposium at Yale was had a smaller attended and our proceedings
were transcribed and later in 1971 partially published in Main Currents in
Modern Thought.[4] 1979 research has been
completed and documents in Andrew Ortony’s compendium book on metaphor and
thought to advance this metaphoric comparison.
With all the controversy around
"knowing"; how do we know we know and the inaccuracy of language and
dubious nature of scientific conclusions I have written over 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 topoi [5] (A traditional theme or motif; a literary
convention.) which we can use to describe architecture. All below sub-paragraphs
(i.e., etc) reference to Metaphor and Thought by A.Ortony. [1] Roman numeral titles are
the section headings for each axiom followed by 1.1.1 subparagraphs for each
axioms sub-axiom [x] are the keys to the footnotes and [A} the references.
II. Generative
metaphor [6] and the “parte”.
1.1 Generative metaphor: A
perspective on problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon [6] In his paintbrush as pump discussion as a metaphor
Schon claims that by attaching to the paintbrush the way of a pump the
researchers were able to better improve the design of the paintbrush as an
instrument which pumps paint on the surface. By describing painting in an
unfamiliar way they were able to make dominant what was already somewhat known.
They then saw the brush as a pump. Before then they seemed to be different
things now they were the same. To arrive at this conclusion they had to observe
the working of the brush and make the observation and then apply it to the
mechanism. The paintbrush was now seen as a pump and the act of painting,
pumping. Schon refers to this a generative
metaphor. [6]
The generative metaphor is the name
for a process of symptoms of a particular kind of seeing-as, the “meta-pherein”
or “carrying –over” of frames or perspectives from one domain of experience to another.
This process he calls generative which many years earlier WJ Gordon called the Metaphoric
Way of Knowing [7] and Paul Weiss [8] called associations
In this sense both in interior
design and architecture after assimilating the program the very first step in
the design process is to develop a “parte’
(An ex parte presentation is a communication directed to the merits or
outcome of a proceeding …it’s the resolution of the argument consisting of
claims, inferences, evidence and warrants to the inference) .It is a “top-down” [6] approach later followed by designs which meet the
parte. The parte may follow the design process and be presented to sell the
product.
Commercial retail shops maximize both visual and physical
access to their merchandise by the use of glass and positioning entrances
convenient to potential shoppers’ paths of travel.
Attached or detached the idea of
the shop as a flickering flame and welcoming transformed shops prior image as
formidable container into which one ventured for surprise and possible
revelation. With this is in mind designers of malls extend this accessibility
to nodes on highways to be close to their prime markets. Commercial retail is
now perceived as an attractive recreational experience and as such provides
shoppers with a secondary perception of the metaphor; shoppers now “carry-over”
from play, rest and relaxation to fulfilling their needs and necessities. “Michael
Angelo” mall in Qatar( In 2008, I was design manager of a city in Doha) was
designed in a Renaissance style with a huge domed entry, shop facades and
themes of the period, paintings, sculptures and decoration reminding patrons
that they are as royalty and in the lap of luxury. This was also adopted by the
Loews theatre chain when all of their theatres were decorated with red velvet
wallpaper, huge mahogany Tudor chairs; chandeliers, plush Aubusson rugs,
beautiful crystal and porcelain lamps and accessories. During the depression and recovery patrons
would come and spend the day in the theater (“Palace” was not just the name of
one of the down town theaters but its description) to not only see the movie,
but buy refreshments and lounge in the many beautiful parlors and lounges.
In the middle of the twentieth
century William Levitt revolutionized and created the home building business as
an industry applying mass production of the home ideal containing what the Park
Ave penthouses had; built in closets, complete kitchens with dishwashers, and
an even better, an attached garage. Not only that but every single house was
identical so that all were part of a harmonious single minded community. It was
called Levittown, the miracle suburb on Long Island that opened the way for the
middle class to move out of New York City. They came to escape crowds and own
their own home, cook with their own appliances and mow their own lawns. They
had GI loans in hand, babies on the way, and a ‘50s brand of pioneering spirit.
Similar stories can be told of the way the modern office
building was catapulted by the invention of the fly–wheel elevator by Otis and
the conversion form iron to steel for building structures to increase real
estate profits in as many as there are layers by building office space in
layers up to the sky as zoning, elevator and engineering would allow.
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.
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. In all of these instances the aesthetics of the times
were both challenged and revolutionaries by the metaphor of the commonplace of progress,
modernity, urbanization, cosmopolitanism, the greater good, and prosperity. All
of these structures were faced in the aesthetics of European classic
architecture especially the roof-tops and the building’s bases and lobbies.
Just look at the rooftops of Manhattan and Chicago and you will find Belvederes
of Florence, roof top of Fontainebleau, and English castles.
III. A dead metaphor [9]
1.2 The conduit metaphor: A case of
frame conflict in our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy. [9] 1.2.1 A dead metaphor is one which really does
not contain any fresh metaphor insofar as it does not really “get thoughts
across”; “language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own
stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone’s else’s thoughts”.
The landscape is replete with an
infinite number of inane replicas which render readers dull, passive and
disinterested (How many times will you read the same book?) Mass housing, commercial office buildings
and highways are the main offenders leaving the owner designed and built
residence, office, factory, fire station, pump house, as unique and delightful
relief’s in an otherwise homogenized context. The reader stops reading because
it is the same as before. Not reading the copy yet seeing the copy and the
collective of copies focuses rather on the collective as the metaphor as the
overall project which also may be “dead”.
In its time, Levittown’s uniqueness and the sub-structures
sameness were its’ metaphor. It was alive and today still lives as new
residents remodel upgrade and exhume their “dead” to become a “living”
metaphor. Disregarding this, the
architects of public housing created dead metaphors and blamed the lack of
pride of ownership for their failure. In
revitalization teams of revivalist have discovered there is more than turf and
proprietorship. Peculiarization, personalization and authentication are
required for a metaphor to live. In this is the art of making metaphors for the
architect of public works.
His metaphor must “read” the
cultural, social and rightness of the metaphor’s proposed context. In modern
architecture no one was better able than Phillip Johnson in his Seagram
Building and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Johnson's early influence as a
practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was the Glass House (1949) he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly
influential work. The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views
as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German
Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already sketched in initial form by
Johnson's mentor Mies.
The building is an essay in minimal
structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection.
Johnson was the head of my Yale thesis jury and my primary design associate on
a project in Puerto Rico and when I returned to Manhattan he invited me to work
with him on the design of Roosevelt Island. Defining the operation of metaphor Reddy says
that 1.2.2 “a conduit is a minor
framework which overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to
flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space
between human heads.
There are also individual pipes
which allow mental content to escape into, or enter from, this ambient space.
Thoughts and feelings are reified into an external 1.2.3 “idea space” and where
thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so that they exist
independent of any need for living human beings to think or feel them”. This most closely resembles works of
architecture and what goes inside and outside works. “Somewhere we are
peripherally aware that words do no really have insides (“it is quit foreign to
common sense to think of words as having “insides” ……………major version of the
metaphoric which thoughts and emotions are always contained in something”)
In his examples one can see a
variety of putting ideas onto paper meaning that the ideas are out of the head
of the creator and onto paper to be read and then transferred.
Architecturally this is best reflected in the example
pointed out by Vincent Scully describing the geometry of urban blocks and the
location of building masses that reflect one anther is geometry to sharply
define the volume and mass of the block and experience of city streets. The
streets are defined by the 90 degree corners, planes and tightness of the cubes
and rectangles to the city plan. In this way the metaphor of the overall and
each building design no mater where it’s location on the block; no matter when
or in what sequence the metaphoric constraint appropriateness, zoning formulas,
all lead the ideas to flow form one to another architect. Furthermore, the
reader is able to “appreciate” the street, its geometry, limits and linearity
as an idea on the conduit from the architect, through the metaphor and to the
reader.
Likewise a visit to the Tyrol will immediately locate the
conduit of design style as practically all chalets, houses and villas have
identical roofs, walls, balconies, windows, flower boxes and doors. The conduit
dominates and connectors builders, designers, contractors, suppliers and
buyers.
That conduit is the dominant theme
that unites all the villages. Interior decoration in the Bronx and Brooklyn in
the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by wall to wall drapes,
cornices, valences, upholstered furniture covered with slip covers, ketch and
bric-a-brac figures and “charkas” known affectionately as “Bronx Renaissance”.
The conduit that connected these outcomes were are system of city-wide gift
stores, national gift market, central
fabric suppliers and workshops and the heroic drapery hangers (of which I was
one) completed their work. 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.
IV Aesthetic affects
of architecture [10]
1.3 Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century
Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad' [10]
writes: “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?” [10]
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?” [10]
The affect of the metaphor on other
metaphors with all its links and consequences is manifest in the conduit which
leads to one after the other and a continuation of the first.
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| Collage from "Legend"by Christina Fez-Barringten |
V. Novel images and
image metaphors [11]
1.4 The contemporary theory of
metaphor by George Lakoff [11]
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.
VI. Plausible
accounts rather than scientific results [11]
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:
VII. Abstract
concepts and perform abstract reasoning. [11]
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).
VIII. Subject matter,
from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be
comprehended via metaphor. [11]
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.
IX. Metaphor is
fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic [11]
1.4.5 Metaphor is fundamentally
conceptual, not linguistic, in nature [11].
After many years living in Saudi Arabia and Europe and away
from Brooklyn I visited Park Slope. I saw the stoops ascending to their second
floors, the carved wood and glass doors, the iron grilles, the four story
walls, the cementous surrounded and conventionally pained widows but what I saw
was only what I described. I did not
recognize what it was; it was all unfamiliar like a cardboard stage setting.
I did not have a link to their
context nor the scenarios of usage and the complex culture they represented. I
neither owned nor personalized what I was seeing. All of this came to me
without language but a feeling of anomie for what I was seeing and me in their
presence, years later I enthusiastically escorted my Saudi colleagues thorough
Washington, DC’s Georgetown showing them the immaculately maintained
townhouses. I was full of joy, perceptually excited but my colleagues laughed
and were totally disinterested. These were not their metaphors and they could
hardly wait to leave the area to find a good Persian restaurant to have dinner.
They, like my self years before did not see what I saw and more relevantly did
not “get-the-concept”. Both of the above
anti-metaphor cases were conceptualized without words as would be positive
cases of metaphor. Aesthetics must be familiar to be perceived; metaphors make
the strange familiar. [7]
X. Metaphorical
language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor. [11]
1.4.6 As language is to speech so are buildings to architecture where
each has a content and inner meaning of the whole 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.
XI Through much of
our conceptual system is metaphorical; a significant part of it is
non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical
understanding. [11]
1.4.7 The science of the strength of materials, mathematics, structures,
indeterminate beams, truss design, mechanical systems, electricity, lighting,
etc. are each understood metaphorically and there precepts applied
metaphorically but often random selections, trails and feasibility are random
and rather in search of the metaphor with out knowing it is or not a metro and
fit to be part of the metaphor at hand.
On the other hand we may select on
or another based on non-metaphorical, empirical test and descriptions of r
properties. We then try to understand the metaphor in the selection, its
commonality, how it contributes to the
new application, how its has properties within itself which are alone strange
and unrelated yet when couple with the whole or part of the created metaphor
contribute to metaphor.
From example in the last 20 years store front's tempered
glass has been enhanced, thickened, strengthen and is now used in large
quantities as frameless curtain walls on private and massive public properties.
A non-metaphorical building product with one used in one context has been taken
out of a non-metaphorical understanding of properties and use to apply to
another. Our primary experiences grounded in
the laws of physics of gravity , plasticity, liquids, winds, sunlight,
etc all contribute to our metaphorical understanding often the conceptual
commonality accepting the strange .
In Belize, faced with a an unskilled workforce and the
government wanting fancy houses for its government staff I choose a plethora of
pre-engineered building components form non architectural catalogs as gigantic
drainage pipes , sawn in half and used
for roofs and in Tennessee relocated the country look of indignities building
with US Plywood's "texture 1-11".
XII. Metaphor allows
us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject
matter in terms of a more concrete or at least more highly structured subject
matter. [11]
1.4.8 Owner occupied specialized works of architectural metaphors may
begin with long periods of research, observations, and analysis ; conclusions
and redesign and re-thinking of existing or utility of new systems; setting our
system feasibility, pricing and meeting budgets, palling and programming,
diagramming and design of sub systems and systems but when complete the
metaphor is accessible, usable and compatible.
The whole of the metaphor is designed in such a way as to
clarify, orient and provide “concrete” reification of all the design parameters
into a “highly structured’ work, a work which homogenizes all these diverse and
disjointed systems and operations into a well working machine. Building types
such as pharmaceutical, petrochemical laboratories, data research centers,
hospitals, space science centers, prisons, etc are such relatively abstract
unstructured uses which only careful assembly can order. Faced with both
housing and creating identify the Greeks and the Romans derived an Order of
Architecture which we now call the Classical order of Architecture.
A classical order (of which Egypt was
the first) is one of the ancient styles of building design in the classical tradition, distinguished by their
proportions and their characteristic profiles and details, but most quickly
recognizable by the type of column
and capital employed. Each style also has its
proper entablature,
consisting of architrave, frieze
and cornice. From the sixteenth century onwards,
theorists recognized five orders.
From its inception design professionals will look outside of
their field and the field of the proposed project to find organism,
technologies provides a conceptual handle as the inner working of microchips,
mainframes, submarines, rockets and jet propulsion, circus, markets,
battleships and air-craft carriers, etc.
Long before the use of computers
after faced with a complex way of teams of service clerks communicating on the
phone, accessing and sharing files and instantly recording all transactions I
invented a huge a round table where all clerks would be facing the center where
would be sitting a kind of “Lazy Susan” . I choose the Lazy Suzan because of my
experience in Chinese restaurants and selling Lazy Suzan’s as a young sales
assistant in a gift store in the Bronx. As a result of the overall design of
which this was one part the company’s business increased and prospered.
One of the executive vice presidents befriended me and late
went on to head the New York Stock Exchange. The installation was a success and
was used until the company closed its doors many years later. Layoff’s observations emphasize the
instinctive, impulsive and intuitive nature of the architect’s metaphor that
takes place in its creation and use.
XIII Onomatopeics metaphors
1.4.9 Like the onomatopoeic
metaphors Lakoff’s mappings of conceptions [11]
override the overt spoken and descriptive and rely much more on Mnemonics
(something intended to assist the memory, as a verse or formula) .However, for
Lakoff the assistance comes from something much more primordial (constituting a
beginning; giving origin to something derived or developed; original;
elementary: primordial forms of life) to the person’s
or societies experiences.
These
become the matrix (encyclopedic) of schemas (in argument; the warrants {where a
warrant is a license to make an inference and as such must have reader's
agreement} supporting the inferences (mappings) where in the metaphor becomes
real). In this way the reader maps, learns and personalizes the strange into
the realm of the familiar. The reader does so by the myriad of synaptic
connections he is able to apply to that source.
Hence architects translate their architectural conception from
philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two dimensional scaled drawings and
then to real life full scale multi dimensions convention consisting of
conventional materials, building elements (doors, windows, stairs, etc).
As maps are
the result of cartographers rendering existing into a graphics for reading so
is mapping to the reading of metaphors where the reader renders understanding
from one source to another. Doing so mentally and producing a rendition of
understanding (as a pen and ink of a figure) not as a graphic but a conceptual
understanding.
Reader sees
in a critical way the existing culling through and encyclopedia of referents to
make the true relationship; the mapping which best renders the reality; the
relationship which informs and clarifies as the map the location, configuration
and characteristic of the reality. As the cartographer seeks lines, symbols and
shadings to articulate the reality so the reader choices of heretofore
unrelated and seemingly unrelated are
found to have and essence common to both the reality and the rendition so that
the metaphor can be repeated becoming the readers new vocabulary .
In fact
architects do the opposite as graphic renditions are made of synapses between
amorphic and seemingly desperate information. Yet the process of mapping is no
less intense as architect review the matrix of conditions, operation , ideal
and goals of the thesis to find similarities and differences , commonalities,
and potential for one to resonate with another to make a “resolution” on the
experience of a cognitive mapping which becomes the metaphor, parte and
overwhelming new reality. The new reality is the target of the source and
finally can be read. In the case of the
birth of an infant metaphor readers may find a wide variety of source
information which is germane to their own experience.
Before the
public ever sees the constructed metaphor Building Officials, manufactures,
city planners, owners, estimators, general contractors, specialty contractors,
environmentalist, neighbors and community organization frost read the drawings
and map their observations to their issues to form a slanted version of the
reality.
Their mappings are based on the
warrants which are their licensed to perform. Each warrant will support a
different mapping (inference) and result in its own metaphor. In effect each
will see a kind of reality of the proposed in the perspective of their peculiar
warrant, where license is permission from authority to do something. It
is assumed if one gets permission it has met the conditions, operations, ideal
and goals of the proposed metaphor.
Mapping is critical at this read to
assure that the architect’s rendering of the program is faithful to the
cognitive, lawful, physical and legal realities. It s like a map which gets
tested by scientist, navigators , pilots and engineers before they build a
craft to use the map, or set out on a journey using the map. Before the
contracts start committing men and material the metaphor must map and be the
metaphor meeting all expectations.
Before building, the suppliers,
contractors and specialist make “shop drawings” to map the metaphor and present
the graphic evidence that they can fill their claim to build for
compensation. The architect’s team now
gathers reviews and coordinates al of these warrants to assure their mappings
do not interfere, nullify but additively contribute to the reifying of the
source to the target and build the final product, on time, on budget and within
the allowed schedule.
After opening the public users have
the opportunity to map any and all the information that is superficially
available form the shell, to its nuts and bolts. Many enjoy reading the project
while it is being constructed to read the work and conceptualize the final form
the bits and pieces they observe, mapping a single task to its final outcome
and so forth. So the mapping of construction by onlookers, contractors is all
part of the mapping process.
Like a landscape artist who gathers
for the chaos of the nature into selected 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."
XIV Mapping is the
systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of
the source and the target domain. [11]
1.4.10 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.
Examples:
Love
Is a Journey
Life
Is a Journey
Social
Organizations Are Plants
Love
Is War
XV Schema [11] There is a list of over 100 schemas in many
categories about basic human behavior, reactions and actions.
1.4.11 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) [11] refers to the school of linguistics that understands
language creation, learning, and usage
as best explained by reference to human cognition
in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First,
it denies that there is an autonomous
linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms
of conceptualization; and
third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.
Therefore the
metaphor of architecture is inherent not in the media of the building’s
presence, parts or bits and pieces but in the mind of the reader and that the
articulation of the metaphor as thinking and third that our use of the metaphor
increases our know ledge of the metaphor and reading metaphors comes out of
practice.
The more we view paintings, ballets, symphonies, poetry, and
architecture the better we become at their understanding and its metaphor
further dwells in the reader while the building and its parts exist with out
being understood. Extrapolating: the
writer of the speech is as the architect and the speaker is as the reader of
the metaphor where the metaphor can only be experienced to be understood. Walk though an unlit city at night and feel
the quite of the building’s voices because the readers have no visual
information and with access to the closed buildings the metaphor is a potential
with being a reality. Yet the potential for cognition does exist and is real
but is not understood apart from its experience. Indeed, primary aesthetics
information is received through the senses. (Arnold Berlant.)
XVI Humans interact with their environments
based on their physical dimensions, capabilities and
limits. [11]
1.4.11 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.
XVII Humans also interact with their
environments based on their sensory capabilities. [11]
Reiterated
in the work of Arnold Berlant, 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.
XVIII. Basically the
scale of habitable metaphors is the intrinsic relation between the human figure
and his surroundings as measured, proportioned and sensed. [11]
1.4.11 It is dramatically
represented by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (see below illustration)
is based on the correlations of ideal
human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, representation of the human
figure encircled by both a circumference encapsulating its’ feet to its
outstretched fingertips where part is then encased in a square.
This scale is
read in elevations, sections, plans, and whole and based realized in the
limited and bound architectural space. These spaces and their variations of
scale are where the reader perceives the architectural metaphors of
compression, smallness, grandeur, pomposity, equipoise, balance, rest,
dynamics, direction, staticness, etc. In his Glass House, Phillip Johnson
extended that space to the surrounding nature, making the walls the grass and
surrounding trees, St. Peter’s interiors is a Piranesi space. (The # # #Prisons (Carceri d'invenzione or 'Imaginary Prisons'), is a series of 16
prints produced in first and second states that show enormous subterranean
vaults with stairs and mighty machines.
XIX Piranesi vision
takes on a Kafkaesque
and Escher-like
distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthian structures, epic in
volume,
but empty of purpose.
. [11]
1.4.11 they are cappricci -whimsical aggregates of
monumental architecture and ruin). Many of my pen and ink drawings were
inspired by the Piranesi metaphor. In
St. Peters the spaces are so real that they imply the potential for all mankind
to occupy. The scale of the patterns on the floor are proportional to the
height and widths enclosing the space they overwhelm the human figure as does
the Baldachino whose height soars but is well below the dome covering the
building.
The metaphor is instinctively perceived, mapped and sorted
by mnemonic schemas as is New York’s Radio city Music Hall designed by my
former employer Edward Durrell Stone and the entrance to the Louver by IM Pei.
The surrounds of offices and shops by Michael Angelo feature window and door
propositionally designed to man’s scale and perfectly mitigate the universal
scale of the 1.4.11 Piazza did
San Marco (St. Marks Plaza). Recalling the plazas of Italy Stone
designed and I developed the State University of New York in Albany which
featured metered arches, columns and pilasters on buildings to mitigate the
various scales of both the large and small plazas.
My interview for the job where Bob
Smith, his office manager, proudly
entertained Mr. Stone and his board with an array of my portfolio covering all
four walls of his executive conference room. The project gave me the opportunity
to plan, design and details many plazas, monumental and convenience stairs as
well as the way they would be enclosed and encased to demark the plazas,
plinths, terraces and porticos of the galleries and circulation areas. Like
Radio City this project was a grand public works metaphor recalling the
Parthenon, Rome, Venice and the many tiny urban villages I had visited
including Lucca, Sienna, Florence, etc. My book on 72 European cities includes
many pen and ink drawings of each city.
 |
| Axonometric by Barie Fez-Barringten |
XX Human scale in
architecture is deliberately violated. [11]
1.4.11 a. 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.
b. 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.
c. 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.
XXI Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in every day
experience and knowledge. [11]
1.4.12
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.
XXII A conceptual
system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings which form a
highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system. [11]
1.4.13 Over the year’s society,
cultures, families and individuals experience and store a plethora of mapping
routines which are part of our mapping vocabulary. As a potential user when
encountering a new building type such as a hi-tech manufacturing center we call
upon our highly structured subsystem to find conceptual systems which will work
to navigate this particular event. Another example is as a westerner
encountering a Saudi Arab home which divides the family from the public areas
of the house as private. In the high tech building doors will not open and
corridors divert visitors away form sensitive and secret areas. In the Arab
home the visitor is kept in area meant only for non-family members and where
the females may not be seen. There is a common conventional metaphorical
mapping which uses a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system.
There is a similarity and an ability to accept and the constraints. The metaphor or the work of architecture
includes each and every nut and bolt, plane and volumes, space and fascia, vent
and blower, beam and slab, each with there mappings parallel to operational sequences,
flows representations, openings and enclosures so that they operate in tandem
and compliment one another. The conventions come from the experiences of doors
that open, elevators that work, stairs that are strong, floors that bear our
weight, buildings that don’t topple, and basic experiences that prove
verticality, horizontality, diagonals, weights of gravity, etc.
XXIII There are two types of mappings: conceptual mappings
and image mappings; both obey the Invariance Principle. . [11]
1.4.14 “A. Image metaphors are not
exact “look-alikes”; [11]
Many sensory mechanisms are at work, which can be
characterized by Langacker’s focal adjustment (selection, perspective, and
abstraction); B. images and Image-schemas are continuous; an image can be
abstracted/schematized to various degrees; and C. image metaphors and
conceptual metaphors are continuous; conceptual metaphorical mapping preserves
image-schematic structure (Lakoff 1990) and image metaphors often involve
conceptual aspects of the source image. (“All metaphors are invariant with
respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each metaphorical mapping
preserves image-schema structure:”
Likewise when we look at the
geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those common
elements where fitting, coupling and joints occur), again this simultaneity of
ideas and image operating in tandem where we see and know an idea
simultaneously; where the convention of the architectural space and the
metaphor of the conception converge.
Image mappings in architecture finds
schemes from a repertoire of superficial
conventions except in a Japanese or Arab house where we are asked to sit on the
floor or eat without knives and forks or find no room with identifiable
modality of uses, or a palace with only show rooms where living is behind
concealed walls.
A hotel’s grand ballroom is both a
room in a palace, a place for royalty, we must be one of them, yet a
congregation of guests in black ties and gowns are contemporary and family
celebrating a wedding. Incongruities merge in continuous and seamless
recollections.
XXIII In cognitive linguistics, the invariance principle [11] is a simple
attempt to explain similarities and differences between how an idea is
understood in "ordinary" usage, and how it is understood when used as
a conceptual metaphor. [11] 1.4.11
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.
XXIV The invariance principle offers the hypothesis
that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that
remain coherent in the target context. . [11]
1.4.11
The components of meaning that remain coherent in the target context retain
their "basic structure" in some sense, so this is a form of invariance.
Architecturally, users encounter a habitable metaphor with their
experience engrafted in a particular mapping inherent in their catalog of
mappings.
This mapping has its own language ,
vocabulary say of the way doors, windows floors, stairs and rooms names work
and the user brings this vocabulary into, the target metaphor, say a new office
building. Of course there will be all sorts of incongruities, similarities and
differences. However this principle points out that the office building
vocabulary will retain its basic structure. This means that while the
vocabulary the user brings to the target from the source will be unchanged
still keeping the images of doors, windows, etc as they were in the residential
the office will be unchanged and unaffected. For example when an architect
designs a bank from his source in the size, décor and detail of medieval great
hall the target of banking with all its vocabulary of teller windows, manager’s
carols, customer’s areas, vaults, etc will not change into medieval ways of
serving, storing and managing the business.
When I designed a precinct police
station for Bedford Stuyvesant I brought the community, park and community
services onto the street and public pedestrian sidewalks while housing the
police offices, muster and patrol functions to the back and under the building.
While the building metaphor is now a community service police station mapping
components of meaning from the source language of user and community friendly,
human scale, public access and service which remained in the target police
station. The vocabulary of all the police functions remained coherent,
perceived and understood and did not vary.
The problem is particularly
interesting when the metaphor of a shopping mall with commercial retail shops
brings its language to a target context of a hotel with service support. The
front and back of the hotel, the rooms and maintenance and the transience of
guest will remain coherent, overlaid with malls covered, circulation and
service area. The separated spaces will face the ambulatory and be separately accessible
to visitors. Such a combination you can see art work in airport terminals being
open shops and passenger circulation to a common metaphor. The airport is still
an airport but an airport with a mall.
The Munich subway and underground
shopping center are another such examples. Underground subway language,
structures, ventilation, circulation is sustained while being influenced but
not overriding the source.
XXV. Our system of conventional metaphor is
“alive” in the same sense that our system of grammatical and phonological
(distribution and patterning of speech sounds in a language and of the tacit
rules governing pronunciation.) rules is alive; namely it is constantly in use,
automatically, and below the level
of consciousness and Our metaphor system is central to our understanding of
experience and to the way we act on that understanding. [11] 1.4.15
XXVI. 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. [11]
1.4.11 Then a metaphor is much more
than the sum of its parts and is beyond any of its constituent constructions,
parts and systems, its very existence a metaphor. In both his books on
Emphatics and Surrogates Dr. Paul Weiss amplified this theory. [16]
XXVII. Metaphor,
induction, and social policy. [17]
1.5.0 Metaphor, induction, and
social policy: The convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert
J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro [17]
Elegant architectural metaphors are
those in which the big idea and the smallest of details echo and reinforce one
another. Contemporary architects wrapping their parte in “green”, “myths” and
eclectic images” are no less guilty than was their predecessors of the Bauhaus
exuding asymmetry, tension and dissonance as were the classics and renaissance
insisting on unity, symmetry and balance.
Both the architects’ ant the public
could not help but know the rules and seek confirmation from one end to the
other. The architect’s parte and the user’s grasp of cliché parte were expected
and easy “fill-in” proving the learned mappings, learned inference trail and
familiarity with bridging.
XXVIII. Filling in where people ascertain the deep metaphor that underlies one or more surface
metaphors by filling in terms of an implicitly analogy”. [17]
1.5.1 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.
XXIX. Synapse is metaphor where two are joined together as the side-by-side
association of homologous paternal and maternal chromosomes during the first
prophase of meiosis. [17]
1.5.2 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.
XXX. Fill in the gaps [17]
1.5.3 Furthermore as observation,
analysis and use fill in the gaps users
inference the locations of concealed rooms, passages and supports, the user
infers from a typology of the type a warehouse of expectations and similes to
this metaphor from others. In this way there are the perceived and the
representations they perceive represents which when explored, inert what we
call beautiful, pleasurable and wonderful.
XXXI. So while architecture is the making of
metaphors and architects are making metaphors their works, though metaphoric,
are not themselves the metaphors but the shadow of the metaphor which exists
elsewhere in the minds of both the creator and the user. [17]
1.5.4 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.
XXXII. Spatial representation in which local
subspaces can be mapped into points of higher-order hyper-spaces and vice versa
and that is possible because they have a common set of dimensions. [17]
1.5.5 In these hyper-spaces many architectural elements are fitted and combine to
make a unity. It can be argued that the seen is not at all the metaphor but the
transfers, bridges and connections being made apart from the building. In
filling in the terms of the analogy lies the metaphor. My design of a New Haven
Cultural Center Concert Hall brought the visitors form entrances on the plaza under
the stage and orchestra and up a ramp into the theatre facing the audience
where they would be after socializing. One seated they world be watching the
stage and the very access back to the street. This would also be the place
where refreshments were served and all would observe.
The audience was planned to be the
entertainment along with the musicians on stage. The architects have tools to
control the metaphor and allow the users to replay precisely what was intended
by the architect. My proposal for an exhibit called: Contemporary Theories of
the Universe” consisted of a giant sphere enclosing a continuous ramp on the
inner circumference going from top to bottom around a three dimensional mobile
of our galaxy.
The entry elevators brought
visitors to the top and as they made their way down they could see were
overhead and side exhibits telling the story of the various theories of
cosmology and the creation of the universe. From the metaphor of the idea, a
sphere containing the universe about the universe to the design of the
entrance, elevators, ramps, exhibits and central galaxy the mapping of the
experience was from the design to the perception. (P.S. Many years later I was
to find one of my former professors design a similar building for the New York
City Museum of Natural History as an adjunct to the famous Hayden Planetarium),
apparently he too found similar commonplaces.
XXXIII. Figurative
speech and linguistics [18]
1.6.0 Figurative speech and
linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock [18] apologizes
for the inconsistencies, lack of derivatives and many unexplained changes in
linguistics to explain the way metaphor is used and understood, misused and
misunderstood.
Likewise, the street talk that permeated my childhood was a
string of “sayings, clichés, proverbs and European linguistic slang. This was
contrasted by the poetry of songs and medieval literature. The architecture was
the only source of my identity having consistency, reputation and allusions
toward science, logic and consequence.
I just know there was something out side of this circus.
Although I could not derive what I saw I could document and retain the types
and details of each type.
My hunger and thirst to know what,
why and how to make these spurned each morning waking before dawn and doing
reconnaissance from the time I was three till I was in my teens.
My tours were capricious and free roaming (my version of
play) but not my curiosity where the metaphors fed me with my identity and
certainty of a reality. The neighborhood authenticated my persona, family and
location. Later my study of architecture was organically adjunctive while
reason for study was to further my own metaphor. Figurative or not , the
metaphors I perceived then are still my “boiler-plate” and when I scrutinized
and sketched over seventy European cities I was able to find metaphors,
similes, and analogies. All was helped by preceding studies under architectural
historians as: Ross, Popiel, Maholy Nage and Vincent Scully (to name a few).
However, Sadock’s examples and apologies
only remind me that my work to derive the phenomenon of architecture as the
making of metaphors is in its’ infancy, beginning to develop a vocabulary and
understanding for the architectural profession and its’ allies. There are none
known to me that today regards the social psychological building metaphors in a
way that translates into practice. As a result, as Sadock bemoans he also
apologizes for the inconsistencies, lack of derivatives and many unexplained
changes in linguistics.
XXXIV. Difference between the indirect uses of
metaphor versed the direct use of language to explain the world. [18]
1.6.1 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.
XXXV. Micro and macro metaphors [18]
1.6.2 He distinguishes and draws
relationships between micro and macro
metaphors and the way they can inform one another as the form of design may
refer to its program, or a connector may reflect the concept of articulation as
a design concept. The way one 45 degree angle may reflect all the buildings
geometry. More the way the design concept, design vision drawn on a napkin can
be the vision, gestalt, formulae, and “grand design” of a particular project.
Such an ideal can be the seed, fountainhead and rudder guiding all other design
decisions.
The macro metaphor drives the micro while they both inform
one another. Classic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Empire, Bedemier, Renaissance,
Modern, Baroque, Rocco, Gothic, Tudor, etc are examples of styles and periods
where a macro design imperative controlled micro decisions.
And, vice versa, where construction
means and methods determined certain design and style as the flying buttress
and buttress of the Gothic’s, the arch for the Romans. The
renaissance not only was informed by discoveries of the Roman classics but by
the intellectual and spiritual exuberance so well exuded in music, art and
sculpture and in architecture by the eccentric articulation of figure and
bugling in pediments, capitals and form of the plans and sections.
Likewise the macro Bauhaus and its
principles doggedly produced the architecture of Mies, Johnson, Breuer,
Corbusier, Gropius, and Meier turning away from fanciful experimentation, and
turned toward rational, functional, sometimes standardized building. In a
lesser way the design vernacular of Frank Lloyd Wright was a macro design
approach from which micro design of particular spaces, details and decoration.
XXXV Some problems
with the emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart
1.7.0 Mechanisms whereby meanings are conveyed”, Discussing the
idioms and informal expressions such as turn on the lights;” kick the bucket”. [19]
XXXVI Metaphors work
by “reference to analogies that are known to relate to the two domains”. [19]
1.7.1 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.
XXXVII. How metaphors
work
1.8.0 Metaphor by John R. Searle [20]
is concerned with “how metaphors work”. As we are concerned with how
architectural metaphors work we can draw some analogies.
XXXVIII. 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”. [20]
1.8.1 With the exception of major
corporate brands, churches, specialty building in architecture the examples is
in infinite as most works designed are with no intended message, meaning or
referent. Many are in the class of others of its types and generally convey
their class while others are replicas and based on a model. Furthermore most
architects have a design vocabulary which is foreign to the user. Conversely,
in public buildings, the user’s expectations, use and expectations are foreign
to the architect. At its best the architect may connect the vocabulary of his
design to some exotic design theory which, results I a very beautiful and
appealing building to which the user finds beautiful but has no idea about the
intended making of the whole or its parts. But some how it works!
After formulating a program of
building requirements and getting agreement that the words and diagrams are
approved by the client. If the architect built-work can meet this program and
come to be the building the client intended is such an example of the work of
architecture as a metaphor and metaphorical work. (They carry-over, bridge, and
are each others advocate)
Limited to meeting the program and the fulfilling the design
contract says nothing about the unintended consequences of the building on the
context and the way the metaphor outcome impacts for users, community and the
general public. In some ways this is the job of municipal Departments of
Community Services, town fathers, zoning boards and building departments and
their building codes.
All contribute to honing the
metaphors and their outcomes which is this relationship of intended words to
spoken words and the chasm between the two.
We are told to think before we speak, picture what you are
going to say then speak, still whatever we speak, in tone, emphasis,
timing(meter) and pitch can carry its own meanings; this was also one of the
final fields of investigation for my late mentor, Dr. Paul Weiss.
1.8.2 Searle’s “task in
constructing a theory of metaphor is to try to state the principles which
relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical utterance meaning”. In like manner the architect tries to
find a way that program relates to design and design the final product.
A good example of unappreciated excellent metaphors is the
cases of the many non-New Yorkers who visit the city and find no interest in
the buildings. Whereas its’ natives have the language, vocabulary and years of
incremental experience to know both the words and the metaphors of each and the
collective of building –types. Searle adds:” [20]
XXXVIII. The basic
principle of an expression with its literal meaning and corresponding truth
conditions can, in various ways that are specific to the metaphor, call to mind
anther meaning and corresponding set of truths” In other words:” how does one thing remind us of
another”. [20]
1.8.3 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. No matter the claims of mansion, palace, castle I will
never mistake any such titled commercial building with the likes of Versailles,
Fontainebleau, etc. yet seeing any view of formal gardens, great castles my
mind’s eye will return me to Schloss Schönbrunn outside of Vienna (the
palatial home of Maria Theresa and the Hapsburg Empire).
In the case of building metaphors
it is the familiarity with not only the building- type, materials, context and
convention but the architects,
contactor’s and owner’s personas which increase the understanding of the
metaphor. In the case of Dubai and other such contexts it is the lack of such
familiarity and tolerance for the strange that makes the metaphor acceptable on
face value. The metaphor is accepted yet not understood. As many beautiful things they are awesome, forbidding, and indicative of some greater condition as
being a stranger in one’s own context.
Buildings are perceived as cars
manufactured by some idioms indicative of their species with little conscious
relevance to the user’s context. It is very strange. Building designed for
people who before this generation found tents to be their habitat metaphor.
Process and products
in making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. [21]
XXXIX. ‘Human
cognition is fundamentally shaped by various processes of figuration”. “The
ease with which many figurative utterances are comprehended are has often been
attributed to the constraining influence of the context” ………..Including “the common ground of knowledge, beliefs,
and attitudes recognized as being shared by speakers and listeners (architects
and users (clients, public) [21]
1.9.0 As speakers’ architects, designers and makers “can’t help but employ tropes in every day
conversation (design), they
conceptualize (design) much of their
experience through the figurative schemes of metaphor (design).
1.9.1 Explaining tropes (turn,
twist, conceptual guises, and figurations).
It explains the standard and traditional building types
found in various contexts as the chalet in the Alps and the specific style of
each found in each of the Alp’s counties and villages, etc. Psychological processes in metaphor
comprehension and memory by Alan Paivio and Mary Walsh say that Susanne Langer
writes that:” Metaphor is our most striking evidence of abstract seeing, of the
power the human mind to use presentational symbols”. [21]
XXXX Interpretation
of novel metaphors by Bruce Fraser 1.10.0
[22]
XXXXI At each moment
in its use the metaphor may mean different things, least of which may be any
intended by its authors [22]
1.10.1 Trying to define metaphor he
says that: “A metaphor involves a nonliteral use of language”. A non-literal
use of language means that what is said is for affect and not for specificity.
A habitable metaphor is not meant for the user to fully, continuously and
forever recall all that went into its production. The fact that the roof
silhouette was to emulate a Belvedere in Florence, windows from a palace in
Sienna, and stucco from Tyrol is lost over time. Even, the design principles so
astutely applied by the likes of Paul Rudolf, Richard Meier, or Marcel Breuer
may be unnoticed in favor of other internal focuses. These many design
considerations may be the metaphor that gave the project its gestalt that
enabled the preparation of the documents that in turn were faithful interpreted
by skilled contractors and craftsman. Yet at each turn it is the affect of
metaphor and not necessarily its specifics that make a good design not a great
work of architecture or a working metaphor.
On visiting the Marseille block I was struck by a plethora
of innovation, and lack of care and relative poor quality thane I was about
standing in a Corbu building. Yet in Gaudi’s Barcelona apartment block the
affect of the sculpture was ever-present. I could not even remember what
particular theory or design principle governed, it was just a Gaudiesque
experience. It is this observation that
allows us to make parallel references to painting, music, dance, painting,
sculpture and architecture as metaphor since they are involves a nonliteral use
of language.
Except the specifications, titles
and performance descriptions a work of architecture metaphor is open to
interpretation and random perceptions in time and space. What the maker might
have intended and its perception may not be exact but can be understood in a
very general use of the common functions necessary as finding the entrance,
elevators, stairs, exits, toilets, etc.
At some point Alvar Aalto chided members of his design team
wanting to distort a part of his final design to which he replied something
like I would prefer you do so that it would be less precious and still valid
after intervention.
Aalto did not rely on modernism's fondness for
industrialized processes as a compositional technique, but forged an
architecture influenced by a broad spectrum of concerns. Alvar Aalto’s early
work was influenced by contemporary Nordic practitioners such as Asplund and
Ragnar Ostberg, as well as by the simple massing and ornamentation of the
architettura mirwre of northern Italy.
His work evolved from the austere
quality of the Railway Workers Housing (1923), to the more Palladian inspired
Workers Club (1924-1925) (both in Jyvaskyla), and from there to the deftly
refined and detailed Seinajoki Civil Guards Complex (1925), Jyvaskyla Civil
Guards Building (1927), and the Muurame Church (1927-1929). Composed of simple,
well proportioned volumes rendered in stucco or wood, these works are
characterized by their sparse decoration and selective use of classical
elements. Whether you know any of these things when you in one of Aalto’s work
you are in awe of its space and simplicity. The same may be said of the work of
Louis Isadore Kahn.
XXXXII. Images and
models, similes and metaphors by George A. Miller [23]
Metaphor as an
abbreviated simile to appreciate similarities and analogies which is called
“appreciation”. 1.11.0 [23]
XXXXIII 1.11.1 In psychology “appreciation” (Herbert
(1898)) was a general term for those mental processes whereby an attached
experience is brought into relation with an already acquired and familiar
conceptual system. (Encoding, mapping, categorizing, inference, assimilation
and accommodation, attribution, etc). [23]
Likewise
aesthetics view of beauty is not based on innate
qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations. Miller
explains how reading metaphors build an image in the mind. That is to say we
“appreciate” what we already know. I have always contended that we do not learn
anything we already do not know. We learn in terms of already established
knowledge and concepts. We converse reiterating what we presume the other
knows, otherwise the other party would not understand. The other party
understands only because he already knows.
The architect who assembles
thousands of bits of information ,
resifts and converts form words to
graphics and specification documents communicates the new proposed (the strange
new thing) in terms of the known and familiar. The first recipients are the
owner, building officials; contractors must read seeking confirmations of known
and confirm its adherence to expectations. After its construction the users
read familiar signs, apparatus, spaces, volumes, shapes and forms. The bridge
carries over from one to another what is already known .Even the strange that
becomes familiar are both known but not in the current relationship.
For example when we apply a
technology used on ships to a building or a room which is commonly associated
with tombs as a bank, etc. Both are generally known but not in that specific
context. We could not appreciate it if it were not known .It is what Weiss
calls commonalities and is the selection between commonalities and differences
that makes a metaphor. About understanding and discerning between what is” true
in fact” and “true in the model” Miller says: Metaphors are, on a literal
interpretation, incongruous, if not actually false-a robust sense of what is
germane to the context and what is “true in fact” is necessary for the
recognition of a metaphor, and hence general knowledge must be available to the
reader (user, public).
“We try to make the world that the author is asking us to
imagine resemble the real world (as we know it) in as many respects as
possible. Offices, bedrooms, lobbies, toilets, kitchens are such models which
are built to specific situations in images of yet some other context.
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 [23]
XXXXIV “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”. Miller sites Webster’s International
Dictionary (2nd edition). 1.11.2 [23] “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. [23]
How metaphors work by
Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar [24]
XXXXV 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). 1.12.0
[24]
XXXXVI Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization in cognitive science, where some members
of a category are more central than others. [24]
1.12.1 For example, when asked to
give an example of the concept furniture,
chair is more frequently cited
than, say, stool.”
I asked a New Yorker to give an example
of an office building and they answered the Empire State Building it would be
because of its height, and reputation, In fact the office building and not the
“church “building shape has come to be a metaphor of the city. New York is an
office building city. I can see only a flash glimpse and I will know it is
Manhattan. [24]
XXXXVII Their
metaphor “cigarettes are time bombs” cigarettes are assigned to a category of
time bombs, what the time bomb being a prototypical example of the set of
things which can abruptly cause serious damage at some point in the future.”
[24]
1.12.2 It is for this reason that
the landscape is filled with many metaphoric topics (applications) based on few
metaphor vehicles (building types) not only true in functions and goals but
also in characteristic building systems and structures. Office (metaphor topic)
Building (metaphor vehicle) metaphor topic as a house may be a hotel, grand
estate, small or large private residence depends on the predicate. Carried with
each are also, social, psychological, political and geographic inferences. [24]
XXXXVIII “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. 1.12.3 [24]
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.
The shift from
metaphor to analogy in Western science by Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski [25] 1.13.0 In the Metaphor and Science section of the book:
“The alchemists they describe a system of
triangulation I developed, taught and applied at Pratt Institute which is as: “Metals
were often held to consist of two components: mercury, which was fiery, active
and male, and sulphur, which was watery, passive and female. Thus the
combination of the two metals could be viewed as a marriage. Metals and other
minerals were often compared with heavenly bodies and their properties
triangulated to produce a third. Not to let this arbitrary characterizations
blemish the structure of this system it is valid to triangulate and in fact
 |
| Free hand axonometric by Barie Fez-Barringten |
XXXXIX 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.
[25]
1.13.1 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. [25]
Renaissance European cities beguile
their metaphor with such combinations known by their scale, cladding, décor,
and entrees. Particularly charming are the German “guest houses ("gast
hofs"), English family pubs, etc. New Towns and contemporary town centers
are mixed use, multi zoned urban cores. It isn’t the referent where one is the
other but where there is a similarity between like features of two things, on
which a comparison may be based: the analogy between
the heart and a pump. The commonality is apparent. They both share a similar
characteristic. The hotel, residence ,
office and shop are joined by their convenience
to that provide service to clients and their use of rooms, and a core of
service, mountainous and housekeeping and supply. A small staff can support
these businesses and there customers are compatible. [25]
They all
have a front of the house and back-of-the -house function (garbage, deliveries,
maintenance, etc) in many 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. [25]
XXXXX 1.13.2 Metaphor is reasoning using abstract
characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight forward extension of its use
in commonplace reasoning. [25]
All this to
say and as if there was a choice that architects
have a choice where to make a new building by analogy or by metaphor. Analogies
may be the ticky-tacks, office
building, church, school building, fire station analogies to a first model
verses an abstraction of a program into a new prototype. Is the analogy any
less a work of architecture? Or do we
only mean that works of architecture are works of art when they make
abstractions?
XXXXXI “In processing analogy, people implicitly focus on certain kinds of
commonalities and ignore others”. [25]
1.13.3 In
my New Haven drafting service, builders would give me a floor plan for me to redraft
to build a new house: they simply wanted an analogy to the first with no
changes. The Florida School Board uses and reuses both firms and plans to design
new high schools based on plans used before to build other schools with only
slight modifications to make them site-specific. This is design by analogy.
Many design professionals use standard details and standard specifications
relying upon analogy to design a new building. The overall may be either
metaphor or analogous. Whole professional practices are formulated and bases on
one or the other practices. Noting these things an industry was created called
the “housing industry’ churning out analogies rather than individual metaphors,
leaving the metaphor to the context or theme of the development. It is famous
architects who are mostly famous because they made metaphors and from them
analogies were drawn.
The
analogous phenomenon has resulted in the nineteenth century Sears offering
pre-designed and package barns ready to ship form Wisconsin to any where by
mail order. Pre-engineered metal being and manufactured homes are all part of
the analogous scheme of reasoning the built environment. Users have access to
either and are able to shift perceptions. In commonplace users wanting to be
fed by metaphorical architecture go to Disney, European, or urban entertainment
and recreation centers. Las Vegas thrives on what I call "metaphoric
analogies” abstractions of analogous building types. It is that synapse which
attracts and beguiles the visitor hungry for authenticity and reality. Living
in analogous urban replicas city dweller migrated to the suburbs in search of
the metaphor of “a man’s home is his castle”. Today this metaphor has become an
analogy as the metaphor proliferates and analogies from one to another state
and country.
We may be told a “cell is like a factory” which gives us a
framework for analogy and similarity. [25]
XXXXXI I 1.13.4 An analogy is a kind of highly selective similarity where we focus
on certain commonalities and ignore others. The commonality is no that they are
both built out of bricks but that they both take in resources to operate and to
generate their products. 1.13.4 [25]
As users,
design professionals begin their design process by finding analogies from
extent projects as user faced with the building resort to their own vocabulary.
Both do not favor one or the other and vacillate between the two for what they
can learn.
For example HOK Sport Venue
Event Company prides itself on designing stadiums
recapturing the community context, history of the teams while designing a new
abstraction worthy of the future of the game and the entertainment of the fans.
“Populous” (HOK sports
facility business) is a global design practice specializing in creating
environments that draw people and communities together for unforgettable
experiences. So much so that the new name of the firm is: “POPULACE”. “As
Populous, we enthusiastically embrace the expertise we uniquely claim—drawing
people together around teams, athletes, events, places, commerce, industry and
ideas they wholeheartedly embrace and adore.” [25]
XXXXXI I 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”. 1.13.5 [25]
Confronting a Bedouin village of
tents a westerner faced with apparent differences looks for similarities.
XXXXXIII 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.” [25]
Cushions for seats, carpets for
flooring, stretched fabric for walls and roof. Cable for beams and columns,
etc.
XXXXXIV 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.” [25]
However, there may be metaphors at
work as well as the user reads the tent’s tension cable structure, banners and
the entire assemblage in a “romantic” eclectic image of Arabness, metaphors
beyond the imperial but of the realm of the abstract and inaccurate. [25]
XXXXXIV “Central to the mapping process is the
principle of “systematicity: people
prefer to map systems of predicates favored by higher-order relations with
inferential import (the Arab tent), rather that to map isolated predicates. The
systematicity principle reflects a tacit preference for coherence and
inferential power in interpreting analogy”. [25]
1.13.8 Arab tentness and
“home-sweet-home” map basics from the “home-sweet-home” to the Arabness to make
all the bits and pieces be understood.
Thus architects choose building elements from catalogs and
in the most metaphoric circumstances designs elements from scratch. Metaphor
buildings may or may not be composed of metaphoric elements.
Metaphors and buildings which are analogies
may of or may not have elements designed metaphorically. However, it is less
likely that an analogues design will contain metaphorical elements. [25]
 |
| Pen and ink drawn on site by Barie Fez-Barringten |
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. [25]
Metaphor and theory
change: What is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd1.14.0 [26]
XXXXXV “Interaction
view” of metaphor where metaphors work by applying to the principle (literal)
subject of the metaphor a system of “associated implications” characteristic of
the metaphorical secondary subject. These
implications are typically provided by the received “commonplaces” (ordinary;
undistinguished or uninteresting; without individuality: a commonplace person.) About the secondary subject ‘The
success of the metaphor rests on its success in conveying to the listener
(Reader) some quieter defines respects of similarity or analogy between the
principle and secondary subject.” [26].Aesthetic
judgments bridge some principle or prior experience to a secondary subject.
1.14.1 Architects design by
translating concepts into two dimensional graphics that which ultimately imply
a multidimensional future reality. She tests the horizontal and vertical space
finding accommodation and commonality of adjacency, connectivity and
inclusiveness. [26]
XXXXXVI 1.14.2 To Boyd, metaphors simply impart their commonplace not necessity to their
similarity or analogous. [26]
1.14.2 This kind of metaphor simply adds information to the
hearer which was not otherwise available which explains the built metaphor that
is neither analogous not abstractly common but works, is unique and serves a
purpose. [26]
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).
Metaphor in science
by Thomas S. Kuhn 1.15.0 [27]
XXXXXVII In
scientific language there is a difference between dubbing and epistemic access.
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”. [27]
Architectural metaphors are all
about names, titles, and the access to that the work provides for the reader to
learn and develop. At its best the vocabulary of the parts and whole of the
work is an encyclopedia and cultural building block. The work incorporates the
current state of man’s culture and society which is an open book for the
reader.
The freedom of both the creator and reader to dub and show
is all part of the learning experience of the metaphor. As a good writer “shows” and not “tells” so a
good designer manifests configurations without words.
However objective, thorough and
scientific; the designer, the design tools and the work gets dubbed with ideas
(not techne) we may call style, personality, and identity above and beyond the
program and its basic design (techne). It is additional controls,
characterizations and guidelines engrafted into the form not necessarily
overtly and expressly required.
Dubbing may occur in the making of
metaphors as a way in which the design itself is conceived and brought
together. Dubbing may in fact be the process which created the work as an
intuitive act. [27]
1.16.0 Metaphorical
imprecision and the “top down” research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn [28]
XXXXXIII 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. [28]
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 [28]
XXXXXVIII 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”. [28]
1.16.2 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.
[28]
The art [F] implicitly has gathered the information
and organized it in way that given the right apriori vocabulary, codes
definitions and signal and sign cognitions one can read the message in one way
or another depending on the individual and the variety of individual
perceptions. Buildings, artifacts, products with embedded (encrypted) workings
can be read, learned, assimilated, connected and either by epiphany or
Pavlovian stimulus –response known. Climbing the stairs of a pyramid in Mexico
City or a fire stair in a high rise is essentially the same except for the
impact of its context and what the stair connects (create and base) and the
object on which the stair ascends and descends. The conditions, ideals and
goals are very different while most of the operation is the same. In this way
you can say that non-architecture can be identifies as teaching nothing. [28]
I don’t believe that there is such
a thing, even the “tin-box” (pre-engineered manufactured factory warehouse is a
metaphor. It may be a one page comic book character but is has content and is
readable. [28]
XXXXXVIX Pulling from three dimensional and two
dimensional means and methods, from
asymmetrical and symmetrical, and from spatial and volumetric design principles
the architect assembles metaphor metaphorically by associating and
carrying-over these principles applying to the program at hand to lift and
stretch the ideas into space and across the range of disassociated ideas and
concepts making a new and very strange metaphor unlike anything ever created
yet filled with thousands of familiar signs and elements that make it work .
[28]
1.16.3 Just as practice makes
perfect for the concert pianist, opera singer, ballerina, etc so is it for the
architect and in aesthetics for the critique and the reader. However, having said this reader is at imitate
disadvantage except for the natives of a particular location. Little old ladies
in the tiniest Italian village can tell in the minutest detail all about every
building, street and area. She has learned and passed on the “knowledge” from
her ancestors and is as trained as its creators but in a totally different way.
Hers is the act of perception and reader who must recreate and challenge her
memory and recollections. She does not have to work at design but at reliving
and imagining the design process to find the details and the whole of the building
and its social, political and chronological context. Her explanations will
include great joy, violent emotions, dis-tastes and rejections of the owners
and authors. Her experience of the metaphor will be different from that of the
creators both about the same work. [28]
XXXXXVX About the difference between words (which are
limited and specific to concepts Pylyshyn
notes: “…in the case of words there is a component of reason and choice
which mediates between cognitive content and outward expression. [28]
1.16.4 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. [28]
XXXXXXI About a
“top-down strategy” called “structured programming” in computer science allows
for a point of entry into a the development of a new idea where you begin with
an idea and after testing and developing that idea bringing everyday knowledge
to bear on the development of theoretical ideas with some confidences that they
are new either incoherent nor contradictory, and furthermore with some way of
exploring what they entail. 1.16.5[28]
1.16.5 The point is there are
better and worse places for introducing rigor into an evolving discipline.
“This explanation is pretty much that path of the development of my theory that
"architecture is the making of metaphors" has followed over the past
45 years. From general recognitions, observations and analogies within the
framework of professional design practice , painting, sculpture and philosophy
to discussions with renowned scholars most notably Dr. Paul Weiss , followed by
a lecture series involving prominent design professionals and arts and then
years of research and documentation into monographs., [28]
XXXXXXII Explaining
this approach as a “skyhook-skyscraper" construction of science from the
roof down to the yet un-constructed foundations” describes going from the
general to the specific in and decreasing general to an increasing amount of
detail and pragmatic evidence, referents, claims and resolutions. [28]
1.16.6 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 Schoenbrun 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.
XXXXXXIII “The difference between literal and metaphorical
description lies primarily in such pragmatic consideration as (1) the
stability, referential specificity, and general acceptance of terms: and (2)
the perception, shared by those who use the terms, that the resulting description
characterizes the world as it really is, rather than being a convenient way of
talking about it, or a way of capturing superficial resemblances”. [28]
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:
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.
XXXXXXIV 1.16.8 “Metaphor
induces a (partial) equivalence between two known phenomenons; a literal
account describes the phenomenon in authentic terms in which it is seen”. [28] Socially
speaking worldly people that work in offices dress 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. [28]
 |
| Education of architects in Saudi Arabia |
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)
The instructive
metaphor: Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science by Richard E.
Mayer 1.17.0 [29]
XXXXXXV “Analogical
transfer theory (“instructive metaphors create an analogy between a
to-be-learned- system (target domain) and a familiar system (metaphoric
domain)” [29]
1.17.1 It was these concerns behind Frank Lloyd
Wright’s separation from the architecture of Louis Sullivan and what spurned
the collective work of the Bauhaus in Germany , that is to express the truth
about the building’s systems, materials, open life styles, use of light and air and bringing nature into the
buildings environment, not to mention ridding building of the irrelevant and
time worn cliches of building design decoration, and traditional principles of
classical architecture as professed by the
Beaux-Arts
movement. For equipoise “Unity, symmetry and balance” were replaced by
“asymmetrical tensional relationships” between, “dominant, subdominant and
tertiary” forms and the results of science and engineering influence on
architectural design, a new design metaphor was born. The Bauhaus found the
metaphor in all the arts, the commonalities in making jewelry, furniture,
architecture, interior design, decoration, lighting, industrial design, etc. [29]
Metaphor and learning
by Hugh G Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag [30]
XXXXXXVI 1.18.0 Concludes
that metaphorical teaching strategies often lead to better and more memorable
learning than do explicit strategies which explains why urbanites have a
“street smarts” that is missing from sub-urban; they actually learn from the
metaphors that make up the context. Of course this is in addition to the social
aspects of urbanity which is again influenced by the opportunities of urban
metaphors: parks, play grounds, main streets, broadways, avenues, streets,
sidewalks, plazas, downtown, markets, street vendors, etc.
About metaphor:
XXXXXXVII “Radically new knowledge results from a change in
modes of representation of knowledge, whereas a comparative metaphor occurs
within the existing representations which serve to render the comparison
sensible. The comparative level of metaphor might allow for extensions of
already existing knowledge, but would not provide a new form of understanding.
[30]
1.18.1 When visiting new cities in
another country one is immediately confronted with metaphors which create
similarities as interactive and comparative as we seek to find similarities and
differences with what we already known in our home context. Visiting, sketching
and writing about over seventy European cities I noted the character and
ambiance of each and the differences between one and another. I drew so many
vignettes of buildings and cityscapes noting the metaphor of each.
I had a Baedeker’s guide to educate
me about the time and place of each street and building. I had already studied
the history of architecture so I could relate the metaphors to their own time
and circumstance, yet I enjoyed each metaphor in my time as places and settings
for contemporary urban life with a backdrop of their historical past, Each
metaphor was of the past’s impact on the future with the unique design of
crafts, building materials, and skills that were peculiar to their times but
were no enjoyed in the present. In this context there are the natives who
experience these metaphors all their lives and the visitor who is fist learning
the lesson of these metaphors. Both experience these in different ways. The
native knows the place and comprehends both the old and the new knowledge
domains whereas the visitor the very same metaphor may be interactive, creating
the similarity under construction. [30]
The visitor (this is my word) may “well be acquiring one of the constitutive or residual metaphors of the
place (this is my word) at the same time; same metaphor, different
experiences. [30]
Educational uses of
metaphor by Thomas G. Sticht [31]
1.19.0 Discusses
how the natures of metaphor as a speech act and serves as a linguistic tool for
overcoming cognitive limitations.
XXXXXXVIII Sticht claims that metaphors have a way of
extending our capacities for communications. [31]
1.19.1 As most artists
their language is beyond speech and to the peculiar craft of their art of which
their practice and exercise develops new capacity and opportunity to teach and
express thought outside of the linguistics but is nevertheless perhaps as
valuable and worthy.
XXXXXXVIX 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.” 1.19.2 [31]
XXXXXXX 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; 1.19.3[31]
XXXXXXXI 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; 1.19.4 [31]
XXXXXXXII 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. They
give us a voice. 1.19.5[31]
XXXXXXXIII “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”. 1.19.6[31]
Architects both compose the program
and reify its contents from words to diagrams and diagrams to two dimensional
graphics and three dimensional models to reify and bring- out (educate) the
user’s mind and fulfillment of unspoken and hidden needs. Needs which may or
may not have been programmed and intended; the metaphor is the final resolution
until it is built and used.
Then it is subject to further tests
of time, audience, markets, trends, fashions, social politics, demographic
shifts, economics, and cultural changes. The aesthetics of the process and the
product are both metaphoric and a metaphor.
Citations listed alphabetically:
Boyd, Richard; 1.14.0
Conrad, Ulrich; 1.3
Fraser, Bruce; 1.10.0
Gentner, Dedre ;
1.13.0
Gibbs,
Jr., Raymond W.; 1.9.0
Glucksberg,
Sam; 1.12.0
Jeziorski, Michael; 1.13.0
Kuhn, Thomas S.; 1.15.0
Keysar,
Boaz; 1.12.0
Lakoff, George;
1.4
Mayer,
Richard E.; 1.17.0
Miller,
George A.; 1.11.0
Nigro, Georgia;
1.5.0
Ortony,Andrew;1.0
Oshlag,
Rebecca S.; 1.18.0
Petrie,
Hugh G; 1.18.0
Pylyshyn, Zeon W.; 1.16.0
Reddy.
Michael J.; 1.2
Rumelhart, David E.; 1.7.0
Sadock, Jerrold M.; 1.6.0
Schon, Donald A. ; 1.1
Searle, John R.; 1.8.0
Sternberg,
Robert J.; 1.5.0
Thomas
G. Sticht; 1.19.0
Tourangeau,
Roger; 1.5.0
Weiss,Paul; 1.4.11
 |
| Free hand axonometric by Barie Fez-Barringten |
Footnotes:
1. Metaphor and
Thought: Second Edition
Edited by Andrew Ortony: School of Education and social
Sciences and
Institute for the learning Sciences: North Western
University
Published by Cambridge University Press
First pub: 1979
Second pub: 1993
2. The first lectures "Architecture as the Making of
Metaphors" were organized and conducted by Barie Fez-Barringten near the
Art and Architecture building at the Museum of Fine Arts Yale University 11/02/67
until 12/04/67. The guest speakers were: Paul Weiss, William J. Gordon,
Christopher Tunnard, Vincent Scully, Turan Onat, Kent Bloomer, Peter Millard,
Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Forrest Wilson, and John Cage.
3. American painter Irving Kriesberg was born in 1919. He
studied painting in America at The Art Institute of Chicago and the University
of Chicago from 1938-1941 and later in Mexico from 1942-1946. Kriesberg began
his interest in art as a cartoonist in high school in Chicago.
In the 1930's he spent many days
sketching the work of the great masters Titian & Rembrandt when visiting
The Art Institute of Chicago. In the late 1930's he came under the influence of
modern art via School of Paris exhibitions prominently exhibited in the museums
in Chicago.
4. Main Currents in
Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1,
New Rochelle, New York
5. Argumentation:
The Study of Effective Reasoning, 2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky
of Northwestern University and published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of
Chantilly, Virginia
6. 1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on
problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon
7. Metaphorical way of knowing by William J.J Gordon: William J.J. Gordon began formulating the Synectics method in 1944
with a series ... William J. J. Gordon, The Metaphorical Way of Learning and
Knowing (Cambridge, ... William J.J. Gordon in his book The Metaphorical Way of Learning and Knowing,
Synectics asks participants to solve problems by thinking in analogies--to
identify ways in which one pattern or situation is like or similar to another
totally unrelated pattern or situation. Synectics uses comparisons such as
analogies and metaphors to stimulate associations. Developed by George M. Prince.
Gordon was one of the original speakers at the Yale lecture series.
8. Paul Weiss: Born in 1901, Paul Weiss has made major
contributions to several branches of philosophy, as well as to teaching and
scholarly publishing. Alfred North Whitehead remarked: "The danger of
philosophical teaching is that it may become dead-alive, but in Paul Weiss's
presence that is impossible". Weiss is widely believed to be America's
greatest living speculative metaphysician, but he has also made notable philosophical
contributions to the discussion of sports, the arts, religion, logic, and
politics. Professor Weiss has been highly productive: his Being and Other
Realities (1995) was hailed as one of his most exciting books, and as this
volume goes to press he is hard at work on yet another major treatise. The
distinguished Library of Living Philosophers, founded in 1938, is devoted to
critical analysis and discussion of some of the world's greatest living
philosophers. Weiss (b.1901) is arguably America's greatest living speculative
metaphysician, as well as a noteworthy philosophical contributor to the
discussion of sport, the arts, architecture, religion, logic, and politics. He
was my mentor when I began this research.
9. 1.2
The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language:
by Michael J. Reddy.
10. 1.3
In Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich
Conrad'
11. 1.4 The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff
12. 1.4 Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively
abstract
13. 1.4 Onomatopeics metaphors
14. 1.4 Mapping
15 1.4 Schemas
1.4.11 Before his death at 101 years of age completed a book
called "Emphatics," about the use of language. Dr. Weiss worked in the branch of philosophy
known as metaphysics, which addresses questions about the ultimate composition
of reality, including the relationship between the mind and matter. He was
particularly interested in the way people related to each other through
symbols, language, intonation, art and music. Emphatics, (2000), which
considers how ordinary experience stands in some dynamic relationship with a
second dimension, which provides focus, interruption, significance, or grounds
for the first.
1.4.11 "Surrogates,” published by Indiana University
Press. Weiss says that: “A surrogate is "a replacement that is used as a
means for transmitting benefits from a context in which its’ user may not be a
part”. Architecture’s metaphors bridge from the program, designs and contractors
a shelter and trusted habitat. The user enters and occupies the habitat with
him having formulated but not articulated any its characteristics. Yet it
works. “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of two sides to a surrogate, the
user side and the context side (from which the user is absent or unable to
function). “ Each of us uses others to achieve a benefit for ourselves. “We
have that ability”. “None of us is just a person, a lived body, or just an
organism. We are all three and more. We are singulars who own and express ourselves
in and through them. In my early twenties I diagrammed a being as “”appetite”,
“desire” and “mind”. I defined each and described there interrelationships and
support of one another. Metaphor is one and all of these and our first
experiences of sharing life with in to what are outside of us.
As Weiss describes our mother language and other primary
things we too ascribe like relations with objects and even buildings assigning
them the value from which we may benefit and which may support. As Weiss proclaims
that we cannot separate these three from each other so that it follows that we
may find it impossible to separate us from the external metaphors. Inferences
that are not yet warranted can be real even before we have the evidence.
Metaphors are accepted at face value and architecture is accepted at face
value. Weiss:” It is surely desirable to make a good use of linguistic
surrogates”. “A common language contains many usable surrogates with different
ranges, all kept within the limited confines that an established convention
prescribes”
It is amazing how that different people can understand one
another and how we can read meaning and conduct transaction with non-human
extents, hence architecture. Architecture is such a “third party” to our
experience yet understandable and in any context. In his search for what is
real Weiss says he has explored the large and the small and the relationships
that realities have to one another. Accustomed to surrogates architecture is
made by assuming these connections are real and have benefit. Until they are
built and used we trust that they will benefit the end user.
Assembling the ambulatory we assume the occupancy, frequency
and destinations. We each are surrogates to one another yet fitted into one
message. When this passage had been used as read as had been other passages,
corridors and links. Like a linguistic the building stands,
like a great, stone dagger, emphatic against the sky. The stair, the exit, the
space calls, gives emphasis and is strongly expressive.
Despite their styles, periods, specific operations,
conditions, operations and goals; despite their building types, country,
national language, weather , climate, culture, etc. doors, openings, windows,
stairs, elevators, floors, walls, roofs, ramps, landscaping, cladding,
decoration, furniture, curtains, etc are all immediately understood and mapped
from past to present , from other to present context and form individual to
community of uses. A door in a private house is a door in a public concert
hall. In fact its differences are naturally assimilated and unconsciously
enjoyed.
17. 1.5.0 Metaphor, induction, and social policy: The
convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert J. Sternberg, Roger
Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro
18. 1.6.0 Figurative speech and linguistics by Jerrold M.
Sadock
19. 1.7.0 Some problems with the emotion of literal meanings
by David E. Rumelhart
20. 1.8.0 Metaphor by John R. Searle
Section on “Metaphor and Representation”:
21. 1.9.0 Process and products in making sense of tropes by
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
22. 1.10.0 Interpretation of novel metaphors by Bruce Fraser
23. 1.11.0 Images and models, similes and metaphors by
George A. Miller
24. 1.12.0 How metaphors work by Sam Glucksberg and Boaz
Keysar
25 The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science by Dedre Gentner
and Michael Jeziorski
26 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
27. 1.14.0 Metaphor and theory change: What
is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd
28 1.15.0 Metaphor in science by Thomas S.
Kuhn
28. . 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)
29 1.17.0
The instructive metaphor: Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science
by Richard E. Mayer
30 . 1.18.0 Metaphor and learning by Hugh G
Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag
31. 1.19.0 Educational uses of metaphor by
Thomas G. Sticht
References:
A. 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
B. 5.0
“Difference and Identity” Gilles Deleuze (French pronunciation: [ʒil dəløz]), (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher
of the late 20th century. Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early
works (i.e., those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly
summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical
relationship between identity and difference.
Traditionally,
difference is seen as derivative
from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some
X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze
claims that all identities are effects of difference.
Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, does
Deleuze argue, "given that there are differences of nature between things
of the same genus." That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the
categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from
differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless
series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and
x'", and "x" = "the difference between...” and so forth. Difference goes all the way down. To
confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they
are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of
apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference in itself.
"If
philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as
philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not,
in other words, in its internal
difference."
In analyzing a metaphor we
ask: “What are its commonalities and
significant differences and what are
the characteristics common to both”.
C. 6.0
Webster’s standard dictionary
E 8.0 The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: a Chinese perspective
F. Art is the intentional and skillful act and/or product applying a technique and differes
from natural but pleasing behaviors and useful or decorative products in their
intent and application of a develoed technique and skill with that technique.
Art is not limited to fields, prsons or institutions as science, goevernment,
securitry, architecutre, engineering, administration, construction, design,
decoratiing, sports, etc. On the other hand in each there are both natural and
artistic where metaphors (conceptual and/technical) make the difference, art is something
perfected and well done in that field. For example, the difference between an
artistic copy and the original is the art of originality and authorship in that
it documents a creative process lacking in the copy.
www.bariefez-barringten.com
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;
Published 2012 by
Cambridge
Scholars Publishing
Edited
by
Edward Richard Hart,
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