Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

The Frenzy of Theorising
In our time, however, theoretical and verbal explanations of
buildings have often seemed more important than their
actual design, and intellectual constructs more important
than the material and sensuous encounter of the built works.
The uncritical application of various scientific theories to the
field of architecture has often caused more confusion than a
genuine understanding of its specific essence. The overintellectual
focus of these approaches has detached
architectural discourse from its experiential, embodied and
emotive ground – intellectualisation has pushed aside the
common sense of architecture. The interpretation of
architecture as a system of language, for example, with given
operational rules and meanings, gave support to the heresy of
Postmodernist architecture. The view of architectural theory
as a prescriptive or instrumental precondition for design
should be regarded altogether with suspicion. I, for one, seek
a dialectical tension and interaction between theory and
design practice instead of a causal interdependence.
The sheer complexity of any architectural task calls for an
embodied manner of working and a total introjection – to use
a psychoanalytical notion – of the task. The real architect
works through his or her entire personality instead of
manipulating pieces of pre-existing knowledge or verbal
rationalisations. An architectural or artistic task is
encountered rather than intellectually resolved. In fact, in
genuine creative work, knowledge and prior experience has to
be forgotten. The great Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida – an
artist who illustrated Martin Heidegger’s book Die Kunst und
der Raum (1969), by the way – once said to me in conversation:
‘I have never had any use for things I have known before I
start my work.’ 6 Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel poet, shares this
view in saying: ‘In reality (in art and, I would think, science)
experience and the accompanying expertise are the maker’s
worst enemies.’ 7
Architecture as a Pure Rationality
The seminal artistic question of the past decades has been
‘What is art?’ The general orientation of the arts since the
late 1960s has been to be increasingly entangled, in fact
identified, with their own theories. The task of architecture
has also become a concern since the late 1960s, first through
the leftist critique, which saw architecture primarily as an
unjust use of power, redistribution of resources and social
manipulation. The present condition of excessive
intellectualisation reflects the collapse of the social role of
architecture and the escalation of complexities and
frustrations in design practice. The current uncertainties
concern the very social and human role of architecture as
well as its boundaries as an art form.
With these observations an opposition emerges: architecture
as a subconscious and direct projection of the architect’s
personality and existential experience, on the one hand, and as
an application of disciplinary knowledge on the other. This is
also the inherent dualism of architectural education.
Science and Art
The relation between scientific and artistic knowledge, or
instrumental knowledge and existential wisdom, requires
some consideration in this survey. The scholarly and literary
work of the unorthodox French philosopher Gaston
Bachelard, who has been known to the architectural
profession since his influential book The Poetics of Space was
first published in French in 1958, mediates between the
worlds of scientific and artistic thinking. Through
penetrating philosophical studies of the ancient elements –
earth, fire, water and air, as well as dreams, daydreams and
imagination – Bachelard suggests that poetic imagination, or
‘poetic chemistry’, 8 as he says, is closely related to
prescientific thinking and an animistic understanding of the
world. In The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific
Mind, written in 1940 9 during the period when his interest
was shifting from scientific phenomena to poetic imagery
(The Psychoanalysis of Fire was published two years earlier),
Bachelard describes the historical development of scientific
thought as a set of progressively more rationalised
transitions from animism through realism, positivism,
rationalism and complex rationalism to dialectical
rationalism. ‘The philosophical evolution of a special piece of
scientific knowledge is a movement through all these
doctrines in the order indicated,’ he argues. 10
Animated Images
Significantly, Bachelard holds that artistic thinking seems to
proceed in the opposite direction – pursuing
conceptualisations and expression, but passing through the
rational and realist attitudes towards a mythical and
animistic understanding of the world. Science and art,
therefore, seem to glide past each other, moving in
opposite directions.
In addition to animating the world, the artistic
imagination seeks imagery able to express the entire
complexity of human existential experience through
singular condensed images. This paradoxical task is achieved
through poeticised images, ones that are experienced and
lived rather than rationally understood. Giorgio Morandi´s
tiny still lifes are a stunning example of the capacity of
humble artistic images to become all-encompassing
metaphysical statements. A work of art or architecture is not
a symbol that represents or indirectly portrays something
outside itself – it is a real mental image object, a complete
microcosm that places itself directly in our existential
experience and consciousness.
Although I am here underlining the difference between
scientific and artistic inquiry, I do not believe that science and
art are antithetical or hostile to each other. The two modes of
knowing simply look at the world and human life with
different eyes, foci and aspirations. Stimulating views have
also been written about the similarities of the scientific and
the poetic imagination, as well as the significance of aesthetic
pleasure and embodiment for both practices.
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