Drawing on Creativity
Today’s trend of reducing risk and increasing efficiency has resulted in the decline of imagination and intuition as a human condition. Historically, architects do not make buildings—they make drawings. Although BIM technologies challenge this notion, drawing is the most immediate and direct translation of an architect’s ideas. Architecture must find new ways to inject spontaneity and unpredictability into the world. Reexamination of the sublime reveals drawing and ornamentation as essential creative outlets for architects to promote a culture of stimulation and speculation.
Drawing is a primitive and humanist act that is not only about innovation, progress, representation, or instruction, but also rather novelty and introspection. There is value in drawing architecture that does not consider empirical restraints of site, budget, gravity, or program. When considering drawing as an experimental craft and unstructured activity, the language of lines and texture exist as realms of their own. In the tradition of ‘losing oneself’ in the creative act, drawing is not only about getting specific ideas on paper, but realizing form by withdrawing from being an ‘outside appearance maker’ and becoming one with the drawing—allowing the creation to design itself. In Authorship and Individual Talent, T.S. Elliot argues that acting out of instinct engages a process of depersonalization, which is a “continual surrender to the vast order of tradition.” Elliot continues to pose that tradition represents a ‘simultaneous order,’ in which “the existing order is complete before the new work arrives”(1). Such an inborn process calls to question the problem of control and to draw without constraints.
When creating architecture [as drawing or building], one can choose to work with or against material. If one chooses to work with the materials, ornament is simpler and reflects the natural beauty of the material. Adolf Loos, for example, describes ornament as emerging directly from natural forms and technical processes (2). On the other hand, working without regard for material expresses the will and imagination of the creator, which introduces the ‘art’ to the material. The degree to which it appears ‘artistic’ is not dependent on the material. Instead, the creative contribution is indeterminate, or boundless to the artist and material. Conversely, craft is something under the maker’s direct control. The problem with a purely craft-oriented approach to creating is that, as James Trilling describes, “virtuosity denies the power of materials, and thus reality because it represents control as an end in itself, the antithesis of inspiration”(3). Concerning T.S. Elliot’s essay, order is learned through inspired practice. Whether through hand drawing or digital modeling, creativity is not a gift. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule, 3 hours a day for ten years of “deliberate practice” are needed to become world-class in any field4. Architecture has the potential to offer the public a practice of art and craft that embodies the effort to form new entries into reading the environment.
The term ‘order’ has always had particular importance for architects. For Louis Kahn, order is, “a creative level of consciousness forever becoming higher in level. The higher the order, the more diversity in design”5. Mies van der Rohe described architecture as a way to, “create order out of the desperate confusion of our time”6. For the purpose of this discourse, order is the perception of connectedness between objects and events. Consilience as a meme is trending in recent ecological theories, including Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘interconnectedness’ and totality. For Morton, totality is not a closed or complete system with a predetermined or fixed goal. Instead, interconnectedness involves facing meaninglessness and uncertainty. Order, in this sense, can build from contrasts between concert and discord, rational and irrational, known and unknown, seen and imagined. Ornamentation can be considered the embellishment of a personal order. Although ornament [drawn or built] may be beautiful, its purpose is not only to inspire aesthetically, but also to bring order out of ‘chaos’—or at least scale down its resistance.
Although philosophically humans are thought of as rational animals, humans have a limited capacity for comprehending the vastness of the physical universe. There is a lineage of this thought that traces to Edmund Burke’s and Immanuel Kant’s work on the sublime, yet that was before we could detect macro and microscopic universes (7,8). Art and the development of ornament are forays into an infinite, sublime universe. An artist can tries to escape this vastness through imagination the same way one attempts to escape morality through love. In both cases, for the lover and the artist, the way one responds consciously may not be the truest expression.
The tradition of ornament is an exemplary case study in the intention to unleash true expression by releasing constraints of tradition in thought, line, and form. Since the shift from the Greek to the Roman orders, this pedigree was reimaged several times in the course of history in decorative attempts to suggest lineage with the mythos of the past echoing in the present. Postmodernism was the weakest of all of these revivals in that its ornament was mostly concerned with the surface of things as opposed to their essence. Such a superficial approach is problematic because ornament was applied as decoration or an aesthetic addition. Another problematic form of post-modern ornament was that, though it flirted with public recognition, it was inevitably an elitist, and internally discussed, intellectual discipline, which was inaccessible to the public. The exclusive nature of post-modern ornament was a rupture from the origin of ornamentation as a communicative device. Originally, ornament was a coded narrative of the relation to space and the humans that made it. The sense of connectedness not only helps users orient themselves within their environment but also enriches them with poetic imagery and the creative impulse of the maker. In a society where information is readily accessible through smartphones and media, it is especially important to recognize and reveal what is genuine.
Every time one looks at a space he or she unconsciously assesses its safety and utility. Similarly, “every moment of every day we organize the random events we see, hear, and feel by grouping them,” write Robert and Michelle Root-Bernstein9. N. Katherine Hays defines this as part of our ‘nonconscious cognition,’ which is how humans recognize patterns before becoming aware of them (10). The more complex an environment, the more resources there are to assess and potentially benefit. Accordingly, an ornamental space can provide more abundant resources than an entirely ‘blank’ space from which patterns can be recognized and used as a basis for the ability to make predictions and form expectations. “Spatial and temporal patterns that cross the boundaries of science, art, music, and design give individuals, trained in the arts and sciences, tools for communicating new perceptions of the natural and designed worlds”11. Consequently, it should be encouraged to adorn the world through a variety of different temporal and spatial scales. Ornamentation, thus, can promote pattern-forming abilities that help increase the capacity to be aware of the scalar information and create their links to innovate.
In a living environment, all forms are generated through a step-wise process of evolutionary transformations. Drawing and building are not natural processes—creativity and imagination are essential when improvising from each preceding step. In the progression, all lines flow out of a parent system in which ornament indexes its branch and root. Every piece, then, connects to its immediately larger and smaller substructure. Components are not assembled to reach a particular end goal, but rather material is transformed in response to the last step. The open-endedness in this generative process introduces an element of risk. As opposed to contemporary BIM technology, there is not a guarantee as to what the outcome will be. Theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall, proposes that starting with a unified theory, or end goal, may not be the most creative way to conduct research. Instead, Randall posits the model building process, an alternate research method that considers taking already established overarching theories and focusing on connecting them to possible routes below. Randal explains, “if you think of a unified theory as the summit of a mountain, model builders are trailblazers who are trying to find the path that connects the solid ground below” (12). In other words, model builders draw from unresolved aspects and seek interpretations.
In design of the environment, architects typically attempt to produce a definite final object, rather than something open and incomplete. Architecture should do less of trying to predict how users will interact with a space, but rather produce offerings about what might make sense and challenge the viewers to interpret or question its meaning. Today, much of the environment is designed to say ‘everything is ok’, and society’s perception of the world remains unaffected. That which requires the subject to make his or her sense of the architecture erases the duality of subject and object and further merges the two into a transcendental experience. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes this union of subject and object as ‘quality’ (13). Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi similarly describes this state as ‘flow’. “In order for a flow state to occur, you must see the activity as voluntary, enjoyable (intrinsically motivating), and it must require skill and be challenging (but not too challenging)…In such a state all human actions become spontaneous and fresh, childlike in their intensity,” (14). Architects should consider this phenomenon as unexplored potential to initiate flow in thought and inevitably creativity in the public realm.
Nevertheless, the modern emphasis on information and social networks promotes dependence on digital and environmental cues, stifling introspection. In the New York Times article published in 2015, “Human Emotion: The One Thing the Internet Can’t Buy”, the writer describes the ‘branding’ phenomenon, which is concerned with the feelings an object may invoke. People seek an “emotional coherence” by buying items of certain brands because they are marketed to induce certain emotions. Driven by “the overabundance of available images,” it is important for architects to understand how contemporary culture longs for emotional connectedness (15). Facebook and Instagram profiles attempt to make connections to other brands and identities. In what ways can our buildings achieve a similar emotional attraction?
An environment’s parlance generates enthusiasm and participation for pattern seeking. Users then experience more cognitive activity that satiates their need and ability to recognize connections and inevitably themselves. “Its almost as if the learning aspect is a side effect” of inhabiting an ornamental space16. Architecture that is conscious of the human predisposition for linking patterns allows the viewer to feel as if he or she is part of reinventing the environment. Drawing into ornamentation is a method of architecture not strictly controlled or limited, but rather designed as an open-ended, uncertain state of being that accepts the participation of its viewers as vital to its justification. A rigorous inculcation of the sublime in the built environment ensures relational inquiry across spatial and temporal scales to keep architecture alive.
Endnotes
1. Eliot, T. S. "Authorship and Individual Talent." The Sacred Wood, Etc. Alfred A. Knopf: New York; Edinburgh Printed, 1921. N. pag. Print.
2. Loos, Adolf, and Adolf Opel. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays.1908. Print.
3. Trilling, James. The Language of Ornament. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Print. p.182.
4. Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Print
5. Kahn, Louis I. "Order and Form." Perspecta 3 (1955): 46-63. JSTOR. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
6. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Robert Venturi. Place of Publication Not Identified: Architectural/Museum of Modern Art, 1977. Print.
7. Burke, Edmund. A Philsophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: n.p., 1757. Print.
8. Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Berkeley: U of California, 1960. Print.
9. Robert and Michelle Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. First M Mariner Books Edition, 2001), p. 92-93
10. Hayles, N. Katherine. "N Katherine Hayles Rethinking The Mind Of Architecture." SCI-Arc Media Archive. Southern California Institute of Architecture. 23 Nov. 2015. <http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/n-katherine-hayles-rethinking-the-mind-of-architecture/>.
11. Henning, Debra. NEXT.cc Blog. NEXT.cc, n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
12. Randall, Lisa. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. New York: Ecco, 2005. Print. p.71
13. Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: Morrow, 1974. Print.
14. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997) “Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life.” (Basic Books, New York).
15. Rock, Michael. “Human Emotion: The One Thing the Internet Can’t Buy”. The New York Times. 14 Oct. 2015. Print.
16. Lerner, Adam. Learning Without Knowing.