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Author Tay
Kheng Soon An
edited version of the guest lecture '"Style and Architecture:
Things we don'tb usually talk Links to Ideas Ecocamp - Re-contextualising of Traditional Forms Biomorphic Architecture (I) - Organic Celluar Forms Biomorphic Architecture (II) - Organic Structures
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2005
SUMMARY It is necessary in this paper to begin by discussing what constitutes aesthetics before discussing fundamental aesthetic shifts that are imminent. To discuss aesthetics, I posit that sensitivity to form is embedded in the human brain, not mind, as propensities selected by evolution. Such propensities are not subjected to cultural or personal preference as the mind is. Three key words need to be clarified - aesthetics, style and taste. Style is personal, aesthetics is not. Embodied in aesthetics are the inherent principles of formal and spatial order. Aesthetics is distinct from any private notion of beauty or stylistic preference. Taste is the stylistic preference of the prevailing age. Once taste and style are relegated into the domain of culture and psychology, aesthetics can be discussed separately in terms of principles of coherence, consistency and context. Coherence and consistency are clear enough. Context is problematic. This will be made clear through discussing the effects of optical, ideological and psychological windowing. What will be demonstrated, when one windows, is how each of these view points determine conditions of coherence selectively, and conversely on a larger scale of perception, why coherence may actually be seen to suffer form formal disorder. This phenomenon raises doubts about acuity of formal perceptions in the context of ideological and psychological content in socio-cultural dynamics especially in times of rapid change. Having established the basis of perception, the discussion then moves rapidly into the main thesis, that is, changes in the modes of production and manufacturing technology trigger corresponding changes in tastes and aesthetics. The model is based on the observation of the overarching influence in aesthetics that has arisen from the mode of production. In the present phase, the overarching influence has persisted for the past 150 years since the Industrial Revolution. It is machine aesthetics in new guises. The overarching influence of production methods interacts with the local politics of taste within the socio-cultural dynamics of each and every place, struggles to come to terms with its past and the present. Judged against the organic criteria of aesthetic order, the results of this struggle are of little virtue if the forms produced are in incoherent even if they were thematically laudable. Having established the conditions and basis of formal order, one can postulate the outlines of a new language and taste in aesthetics that are emerging from the radically new conditions today. There is a new industrial order that has global reach. Premised on information technology, sophisticated chip-controlled mechanical production , advances in bio-technology and a growing concern for environmental sustainability - a new taste in aesthetics is impelled. The dominance of the planar aesthetic and the primacy of tectonics presumed to be the master design language of the current phase in Singapore and many “Catch-up States” is actually passé. Tectonics should now be seen for what it is: a language of mechanical connections impelled by jointing and connecting expressive of mechanical culture and 20th Century industrialism. What would take its place is a language premised on organic flows, nature and biological formal orders arising from a new technology. Hopefully, it will be something less wilful and something that respects more the “autocatalytic” properties of nature. Thus the new taste has healing potentials for people and their impact on nature. STYLE
AND TASTE Whatever the style,
the form must satisfy the principles of coherence and consistency
as a whole rather than in parts. Hard-wiring, may be inferred from the theory of evolution by natural selection. Propositioned this way, it is not hard to deduce that acuity in perceiving form and space would have been selected because they have survival value. Obviously, recognition of facial and bodily characteristics was necessary to prevent inbreeding among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Ability to read subtle signs in body language may make the difference between life and death. These same cognitive capabilities were also essential for successful hunting, which requires complex spatial estimation, trajectory imagination, aim, topographic memory and pattern recognition. For gathers, visual acuity to distinguish textures, colours, spatial characteristics, shapes and classification of forms (morphology) are all highly important. These capacities therefore constitute our cognitive endowment built into the human frame. These very propensities enable humans to read every nuance and aspect of formal difference; from very large settings to rhythmic patterns and down to very subtle, small forms and spaces. Thus, the human brain makes sense and order out of the randomness and chaos of nature through zooming in and out in order to comprehend things relationally. Brain is the stuff of the earth. My friend, a Professor of Geography in Montreal once said, “Geography is the study of the wisdom of the inhabited Earth”. As such, it can be inferred,if brain is of the earth, then it too must be part of the same wisdom. Culture has generally maligned brain and exonerated mind. The Mind is different. It is directly conditioned by acculturation and socialization, and therefore the product of proximate concerns. Creative individuals all know that they must operate in both realms, suspending one to comprehending the other at will. Thus knowledge is of two kinds; real and constructed according to current norms. This is implicit and explicit ideology in theory-formation. All talented designers can shift from mind to brain functions at will to realize important truths in the design by not allowing mind functions to corrupt brain realizations. These, then, are the bases of the human capacity to make coherent, consistent and contextual judgments. These, needless to say are essential processes in architecture design. CONDITIONS
FOR COHERENCE CONTEXT Every operation of visual cognition is contexted. View is always framed either psychologically or ideologically. Views also range from macro to micro and from actual to virtual. Framing is an act of judging - consciously or unconsciously. Within a micro frame, a thing may appear coherent and consistent but on zooming out, it could be found to be incoherent and inconsistent. Framing affects judgment and judgment selects framing. Thus framing is conditioned by psychology and/or ideology. Once the frame is set, perception will be affected. We see what we want to see. Ideology predisposes an individual to target something of interest. It sets the frame. Psychology determines what value to assign to particular subjects within the frame. Visually, psychology determines content and degree of magnification. While ideology places emphasis or establishes viewpoint, psychology decides the degree of detail in the information desired. Both determine what is to be cut off or highlighted. In other words ideology and psychology are both the cause of blind spots. All these operations make great and subtle differences in perception of coherence and consistency. How can we demonstrate these ideas? One test will show how context or framing affects the perception of whether something is coherent or not. The test: Select any part or assemblage of a thing and visually frame a view of it. The act of framing will be clearly realized as an act of composing and selecting what should be in the view. While in everyday life the process takes place largely unconsciously, when one does so deliberately as in a test, one becomes aware of one’s considerations in the choices made. We become aware that our reasons are. These are always implicitly or explicitly ideological, practical and/or psychological or a mix of all these. Zooming in or out includes or excludes but composing involves deploying innate cognition. The degree of control can be taught through an explicit pedagogy of form but learning needs the individual to suspend subjectivism. This is very difficult. To the extent that one is able to suspend the ideological, the pragmatic and the psychological is the extent to which one can make the necessary primary judgments. This is autonomy of aesthetics, i.e., the ability to temporarily suspend mind to make sensible choices and judgments autonomously is the key to making coherent and consistent designs. Coherence and consistency is assured in the process of composing only when the brain is free to sense. Otherwise, formal coherence and consistency must rely on the mind’s ideological attachment to preferred design models. Copying seems the only way to achieve coherent designs when the designer is unable or unwilling to reach into the deeper resources of his or her brain. The second test demonstrates the effect of isolating mind-based subjective judgment. Pick an object not usually regarded as beautiful or aesthetically coherent or consistent such as a decaying flower. The test is to find if there are any redeeming features in the object. Zooming in automatically changes the familiar context. One is immediately struck by the unexpected richness and subtleties before our eyes. Magnification changes perception. The pattern of patches, streaks, junctions, boundaries, curvatures and transitions is now composed in the micro frame. It is coherent because the colour and texture patches are now composed coherently in the frame and this heightens the effect of the new found delights. This demonstrates the power of decontextualisation and recontextualising. All these in a withered flower! Conversely, the procedure works to exclude incoherence in a macro setting through selective viewing of an incoherent composition, building or urban setting by thought induced sight. This kind of selectivity is understandable in a world increasingly incoherent. Unwilling and powerless to confront the disorder, it is a defensive strategy then to euphemistically justify incoherence as “plurality”. The aesthetics of Post-Modernism is therefore aesthetically cowardly and promiscuous despite the validity of multiple coding. In some cultures, mind is so predominant and sense so suppressed that aesthetics is deprived of sense to such and extent that taste is literally a non-sense. In its place, appreciation is totally constructed out of symbols and icons. FRAGMENTATION:
STRATEGY TO COPE WITH INCOHERENCE Thus the rejection of structuralism and meta-theory is lapped up by the new generations. It is dope that feeds the cravings for uninvolvement. Thus the selfish aspects of phenomenology and a myopic ontology are lapped up by the young. This is perfectly understandable of youth who feel powerless. The position should not be encouraged. By disengaging from the terrors of the crass macro context, the terrible status quo is actually strengthened. Architecturally it results in more incoherent designs, more kitsch and intellectualised gibberish. In this context,
the aesthetic project at hand to achieve coherence and consistency
at every scale, from the largest to the smallest, in the actual and
in the virtual world is important as basis to define what next. The
ambition is social, cultural and environmental healing, no less. Technology has always been the prime mover of form. When muscle power was at its prime, it was vivified through intricate and refined craftsmanship. Craftsmanship was therefore king and architecture was craft, writ large. The Norman Shaws and the William Morrises, for all their conscienced idealism and calls for a more humane landscape, missed the point and the plot. History passed them by but their romantic idealism remains. It is a source of great power if romance can engage the machine. Mass production changed everything and the captains of commerce reshaped the world according to the machine. Art and architecture were appropriated. Manufacturing technology’s perfection of seamless surfaces, edge-to-edge planes and prismatic extrusions, was the challenge to designers willing to embrace machine aesthetics. The arts and crafts movement was swept aside by the Bauhaus, Rietveld, Mondrian and Theo Van Desburg. They built the bridge. When corporate capitalism finally saw it in their interest to mass produce cheaper and faster and sell more , they appropriated Bauhaus aesthetics and tastes. The world was taken by storm and the plane, the wheel, the cone and the tube became the design language of everything. These became the language of modernity itself from the metropolis to the village. Thus, there is an aesthetic force that overarches everything. Aesthetics, taste and style have always been premised on the characteristics of the manufacturing technology of the time. It is this same force that, once changed, will again shape the taste in aesthetics. One can expect therefore if there should be a shift in the characteristic of manufacturing technology and the institutional support systems that run it, there would be corresponding shifts in aesthetics, taste and styles. Local socio-cultural dynamics is not independent of this. It interacts with it. A period of confusion always attends major moments of change. Industry is changing. Now is the turning moment. Expectedly, there would be mixed responses for, against or tangent to the prospective new order. Anything new is always resisted and misunderstood. To be expected there will be institutional, cultural and professional lag-effects. These fall under the rubric of local socio-cultural dynamics. But under the overarching of the new industrial order the dust will settle and a new aesthetic taste will come round, sooner or later. THE ROMANTIC
SPIRIT In the thick of the battle of the styles and the nihilism at the turn of the 20th Century, Cubism was the ironic/romantic response to the machine. It reshaped human forms to accommodate machine aesthetics and thereby conjured a new image and new taste. It contributed to the idea of shifting perspectives captured in an instant. Neo-Plastics and De stijl took a different path. It searched for plasticity in the interstices of the Euclidian imperatives embedded in machine aesthetics despite it. It engaged the new technology and successfully resolved the dilemma of romance versus the machine by not denying the machine but by inventing a new style and aesthetics of plastic space within rectilinear geometrical space. These were so successful that the new aesthetic taste and language bridged the dichotomy so well that it actually ushered in the new industrial aesthetic. And the world was never the same again. By mid 20th Century, the new industrial aesthetic order was rooted in everyday reality. Machine-based art and architecture were then co-opted into the service of the new techno-managerial-economic order. The human spirit was both bribed and cajoled into a market economy dominated by Corporate Capitalism. Disenchanted youth of characterized this as the “military industrial complex”; the causer of wars and terror. Protest by youth everywhere erupted in the West in the phenomenon called the “Counter-Culture” of the 60s and 70s. Idealism survived into the late 70s and 80s in the form of Post Modernism and Deconstruction philosophy. These sought to uncover the sequestered underpinnings of the industrial order. In architectural circles, Post-Modernism was a critique of Modernism. But the critique was misdirected. It mistook modernism for modernity. Failing to distinguish modernity for the industrial nature of mechanical modernism, the critique on Modernism led to a chaotic frenzy in architectural design. Industrialism created a crisis of its own. The new digital and informational revolution challenged serial mechanical industrialism at it roots. Industry is still reeling under the impact especially under the harsh imperatives of the cut-throat pricing by China and now India as they enter the world market. Competitive economics dictated that things had to be cheaper, made faster, made better and reach the buyer quicker. Post Industrialism, on which Post Modernism was based, focused on epistemology, literature and art. In architecture it led to the fretful toying of history. Deconstruction was taken literally in the preference for fractured forms and spaces. Art, architecture and design must now embrace the new flexible technology not reject it as the arts and craft movement did - and thus failed. There is a new sensibility premised on information, i.e. software, biology and environmental sustainability to be articulated. With this to envision, a new human/nature resolution is vivified. In line with new technological convergence between 19th Century mechanical order and 21st Century bio-informational order it is therefore necessary to postulate a new theory of style and design aesthetics. Thinkers, artists and designers must engage in this new reality and not evade it. THE CONSCIOUSNESS
OF DESIGNERS Technology and psychology are in conflict. This is the crisis. Prosperity and politics combine to render the new generations powerless except as passive consumers. They refrain from daring to sense and think of a new possibilities. The problem of fashionable philosophy is that it panders to the helplessness of the young and justifies it as freedom. Thus the flaneur, the middle class urban anti-hero sashays through life. Philosophy needs to inspire the imagination of the young on to challenge of locale and history. Only when philosophy puts the young in the centre of the growth path of reality will there be energy for change. The offerings by new technology combined with the inspiration of nature needs to be articulated as worthy design agenda to manifest a new world order. The opportunities are very great, the vision needs to be correctly focused. NEW TECHNOLOGY,
NEW AESTHETICS Culture as we
know it is the result of slow acculturation and absorption of influences
layered over the slow processes of internal change. As such we tend
to think of culture as local processes. This is not so as never before.
Influences in the past traveled slowly. Today it is instantaneous.
Thus , we have to accept the implications. Global influences forms
an undeniable overarch over and above local socio-cultural dynamics.
Style, taste and value come out of the interaction between the overarch
and local realities. This is the new dynamics. What is taken
to be the language of architectural tectonics is but Industrial aesthetics
expressed through the taste for mechanical connections and joints.
THE NEW
NATURAL ORDER As attitudes and design now move towards the natural, the biological and the organic, design metaphors will follow suit. Here I am referring to deep-structure aesthetics not superficial mimicry of plants and animals. Some deep-structure aspects are as follows: Aesthetics will shift towards the proper expression of changeability and adaptability, process-expression, spatial-fluidity, modulated- transformations and random organic order. The penchant for planar or geometric surface aesthetics will shift to variegation and interweaving of free-forms. Fluid forms will gain primacy. Discrete junctions will be replaced by gradual transitions. There will be a hybridization between natural and planar geometries. These will coexist during the transition until the new fluid forms are backed by new appropriate technologies. There will always be an interaction between technology and intention. When structures can emulate biological growth, tectonics will still have to be reckoned with but attitudes towards it will be different. “Minimalism” and “Zen” aesthetics are emaciated attempts to blunt the banality of industrial aesthetics. It exploits the linguistic imagery through ideological rhetoric. The challenge of the new Natural Order requires a bolder spirit and a more robust involvement. The characteristics of organic aesthetics and indeed the potentials they possess point towards an entirely different design attitude. Moreover, practice itself will change. Design will not be confined within a studio or office space. The designer and the design will be on site to make direct responses and adapt to real problems and opportunities. While envisaging an aesthetic shift towards the natural, I personally avoid literal representations of gherkins and fish or any such-like things architecturally. What I seek is to manifest the principles of organic randomness, closeness and care of plants and animals in planning, use of natural materials sustainably, accommodating change and modification as nature does it. I am challenged to conceive of a skyscraper that can grow and change. I want to use water on the surface of buildings to foster plant growth and cool the place. I want to design structures that tip-toe into the rain forest by building lightly using small structural elements in small increments to add strength where it is needed. I want to plan a city region with zero emission. Plant a forest of trees and bamboo before selective harvesting them to build what is needed. Turn sewerage into energy; recycle everything. This for me the agenda of natural design. It is more than style - it is strategy. My taste for machine aesthetics is ebbing away. The new bio-botanical
space will eventually converge wherein human creativity is realigned
with nature, as the central concern, then human nature and nature
will be in harmony and rising existential paranoia will finally quieten.
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