The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

THE INNER STUDIO
The part of us that is at the undeclared center of creativity is
outside most architectural curriculum, and it may seem odd to
suggest that self-knowledge needs to become an integral part of a
designer’s education. But I find it very interesting that this undeclared
inner world of the designer has always been covert and
ignored in education. Schools make every investment in the outer
world–becoming “wired,” striving for enhanced global information
exchanges, competing for academic excellence–and all of these are
important, but they do not begin to address the deeper strata of
conscious and unconscious longings, needs, emotions, and desires
that influence decision makers and affect decision making. I have
come to believe that the idea of declaring the role played by the
psyche in the creation of the built world is the best way to guide
architectural know-how and heal the environment. The revolution
I am imagining is one where we step back and consider that learning
how to face design problems is critically important in learning
how to solve them, where we consider that the how can not be
separated from the what.
While studying architecture in London, I often visited a public
library on St. Martin’s Street where I would spend time, reading,
drawing, daydreaming, and wandering through the rich collection
of books and journals. There was a modest scale to the three-story
building and, sitting at a wooden desk in my favorite chair, I always
felt comfortable, as though I was enjoying a stimulating conversation
in the lobby of a small hotel. This was a library in which any
idea could either be tracked back to its origins or projected into
some future possibility.
One day I stumbled across an essay in Art International called
“Suicide and the Soul” by the American psychologist James
Hillman. I began reading and soon found myself completely
immersed in the world of the psyche he described. I read late into
the evening and returned to the library in the morning to finish the
article before combing the bookshelves for works by Freud and
Jung in order to better understand the essay. For the next week I
returned every day to the library to read about the psyche. I moved
from my usual chair in the art section to the psychology section of
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