Shape

393 Notes to pp. 48–50
Langer’s discursive forms of symbolism. There’s combinatorial play with ‘‘simple, accessible
units,’’ and in fact, Galison’s story concludes neatly at the University of Chicago and New Bauhaus
with Charles Morris—‘‘We are now discussing the question as to how far art can be regarded
as a language.’’ And the same discussion continues today. Morris helped to get Rudolf Carnap
from Vienna to Chicago, and this leads to Herbert Simon and his ‘‘sciences of the artificial’’ with
their ‘‘logic of design.’’ Then, tangled offshoots connect in sundry ways to others engaged in
today’s round of ‘‘transparent construction’’ using constituents and units of different kinds. Notably,
from the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies at Cambridge, see L. March, ‘‘The Logic
of Design and the Question of Value,’’ in The Architecture of Form, ed. L. March (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), 1–40, for a telling account of Alexander’s pattern language, followed
by L. March, ‘‘A Boolean Description of a Class of Built Forms,’’ 41–73. The combinatorial
approach is pretty much the same for both Alexander and March, although the emphasis shifts.
On the one hand, there are permanent ‘‘atoms’’ of space to make what’s right, and on the other,
arbitrary units of geometry and form to explore what’s possible. L. March and C. F. Earl, ‘‘On
Counting Architectural Plans,’’ Environment and Planning B 4 (1977): 57–80, show the kind of configurational
enumeration that March recommends and that many try with important results. W. J.
Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1990), is overtly linguistic with vocabulary and syntax, and there are intersections wherever
computers are used in design. I guess I’m involved, as well, yet this hardly seems to matter with
embedding. I’ve had an out from the start, and I use it freely as my eyes wander promiscuously.
You don’t have to make up your mind once and for all to go on—you can see and do anything
you like—unless foundational units, and from them, the ‘‘manifest building up’’ of guaranteed
results, set the way in advance. There is no vocabulary. Design is more than combining units no
matter what they are. Shapes and rules allow for calculating in another way in which seeing is key.
7. G. Stiny and W. J. Mitchell, ‘‘The Palladian Grammar,’’ Environment and Planning B 5 (1978): 5–
18. Even though the grammar has no vocabulary and isn’t syntax, it works for configurational
enumeration. The details are in G. Stiny and W. J. Mitchell, ‘‘Counting Palladian Plans,’’ Environment
and Planning B 5 (1978): 189–198.
8. The Flip Wilson Show, NBC, 1970–1974.
9. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 68.
10. D. A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
11. J. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, vol. 12 of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953 (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 108.
12. P. Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. S. Moholy-Nagy (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1953), 18. For
a lively reprise of Klee’s medial lines, see T. W. Knight, ‘‘Computing with Ambiguity,’’ Environment
and Planning B: Planning and Design 30 (2003): 165–180. I use Knight’s bivalent description of the
shape
to begin the dialogue on page 12. This contrasts my ‘‘part ambiguity’’ that embedding entails—
what triangles are there?—with the ‘‘representational ambiguity’’ that medial lines imply—what
planes are shown? There’s seeing and making something out of it, although the two may look the