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| All collages are created by Christina Fez-Barringten |
“architecture is
the making of metaphors”
By Barie Fez-Barringten
20, 672 words on 53 pages
bariefezbarringten@gmail.com
Abstract:
This monograph is predominantly
developed from a study of “Metaphors
and Thought” 1 by Andrew Ortony, and
are in addition to over forty years of work about “architecture as the making
of metaphors” and presents the science supporting the stasis that architecture
is the making of metaphors; resolving why architecture is an art; that architecture
is an art because it too makes metaphors. The commonality of all arts is that
they technically express something in terms of their peculiar craft and thus
they are metaphoric. However technically metaphoric, how does architecture
conceptually make metaphors and is there an influence between the technical and
the conceptual architectural metaphor?
When kingdoms created dynasty’s iconic buildings
the architect and artisans took their ques from the reigning monarch. In our
modern pluralistic society the free reign of ideas and opinions about contexts
and their meanings are diverse. Not only is my childhood quest relevant but the
essence of the responsibility of today’s architect who not only reasons the
technical but individually reasons the conceptual . It is to the architect that society turns to be
informed about the shape and form of the context in which life will be played.
With this charge the need to know that we
know and do by reasoning what science verifies by the scientific method to know that we know about the buildings ,
parks, and places we set into the environment. It is a public and private
charge included in the contract for professional services but unspoken as
professional life’s experience; to prove the relevant, meaningful and
beneficial metaphors that edify encourage and equip society as well as provide
for its’ health, safety and welfare. So it is critical to realize, control and
accept as commonplace that the role of the architect is to do much more than
build but build masterfully.
Keywords:
metaphor,
architecture,thought,commonality, commonplace,dubbing, cognitive,knowing,
stasis,art, linguistic analogy, equilibrium,equipoise,topoi, top-down, frame
conflict, appreciate, conduit,parte,design system, modified culture, mapping, structure, domain, signs,
apparatus, spaces, volumes, shapes,forms, metaphorical mappings, invariance principle, alive,dead,
onomatopeics, surrogates, appetite, desire, mind, indirect use,direct use, vision,
gestalt, formulae,grand design, psychological, processes,metaphor
comprehension, memory,mnemonics, encoding,
mapping, categorizing, inference, assimilation, accommodation, attribution,
inferential import, structured programming, stability, referential
specificity,general acceptance of terms, vividness thesis, difference,identity, comparison sensible,communications
The science supporting the
stasis to architecture being an art:
“architecture is the making
of metaphors”
20, 038 words on 51 pages
The
science supporting the stasis that architecture is the making of metaphors;
resolving why architecture is an art; that architecture is an art because it
too makes metaphors. The many facets of metaphor and art. The below is
predominantly developed from a study “Metaphors and Thought” by Andrew
Ortony1, and are in addition to over forty years of work about “architecture as
the making of metaphors” (please see background after the monograph for your information).
The commonality of all arts is that they express something
in terms of their peculiar craft and thus they (all arts) are technically
metaphoric, metaphors because they transfer, carry-over and express one thing
(some idea) in terms of another(the craft). While all art is not expressed as a
linguistic metaphor all arts are metaphoric. Likewise, if architecture is the
making of metaphors what are the linguistic, psychological, and cognition
science’s commonalities between architecture and metaphors? This monograph is
linguistic analogy transferring from linguistic, psychological and cognitive
fields to art and architecture what has been scientifically studied. This is
the “stasis” (the state of equilibrium {equipoise} or inactivity caused
by opposing equal forces) of the controversy of architecture being an art; that
if architecture behaves, acts, looks and works like art than it too must be an
art. Why? Because it, too, makes metaphors, and those metaphors are varied in
depth, kind, scope and context. It is the stasis because it is where art
and architecture meet. The metaphor is the conceptual focal point.
While
many claim that the architect is the “techne” artist being a crafts man point
has been conceptual and so useful as to bridge, carry-over and provide both
artist and architect a common authority over the making of the built
environment. As stasis, Architecture as the making of metaphors enables the
center of the dispute to be argued with common purpose. So this is a stasis in
definition which concedes conjecture. While there may be other concepts
justifying the relationship between art and architecture the metaphor is the
stasis, common ground and commonality apparent to me. It not only is apparent
but I have found has wide and broad applications to a variety of arts and
architectural definitions, practices and contexts. There may have been a time
when the architect was the “master builder” and the lead craftsman but that is
only true by his skill in drawing, design and specifying and not his skill as
master carpenter.
Before
solidifying our hypothesis about architecture and metaphors we both compare
architecture to the art of sculpture reflecting Christina’s work as a
sculptress and my work as an architect and designer. It soon became apparent
that while we could easily agree that buildings were “sculptural”,” colorful”,”
lyrical”, “graceful”, ”rhythmic” etc. these were illusive and neither a field,
base, or what was it? a true commonality to all the arts, including sculpture
and architecture; so
The
commonality of all arts is that they technically express something in terms of
their peculiar craft and thus they are metaphoric. However technically
metaphoric, how does architecture conceptually make metaphors and is there an
influence between the technical and the conceptual architectural metaphor?
“If the walls could only speak”; they do! Are you listening?
“If the walls could only speak”; they do! Are you listening?
In 1967, during the series of colloquia at Yale on art,
Irving Kriesberg had spoken about the characteristics of painting as a metaphor.
It seemed at once that this observation was applicable to architecture and to
the design of occupiable forms. An appeal to Paul Weiss drew from him the
suggestion that we turn to English language and literature in order to develop
a comprehensive, specific, and therefore usable definition of metaphor. But it
soon became evident that the term was being defined through examples without
explaining the phenomenon of the metaphor; for our purposes it would be
essential to have evidence of the practical utility of the idea embodies in the
metaphor as well as obvious physical examples. However, since then, in 1977, a
group of leading philosophers, psychologist, linguists, and educators gathered
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to participate in a multi
disciplinary conference on metaphor and thought which was attended by nearly a
thousand people. Our symposium at Yale was had a smaller attended and our
proceedings were transcribed and later in 1971 partially published in Main
Currents in Modern Thought. 1979 research has been completed and documents
in Andrew Ortony’s compendium book on metaphor and thought to advance this
metaphoric comparison.
With
all the controversy around "knowing"; how do we know we know and the
inaccuracy of language and dubious nature of scientific conclusions I have
written over twenty monographs about architecture as the making of metaphors?
This is the first with the sciences of linguistic, psychology and cognition
definitions of the metaphor and therefore a
set of facts by which to base our comparison.
It is
my hope that these commonalities will provide substantive reasons to allow the
metaphor linking architecture to metaphors as my theorem: "architecture is
the making of metaphors”. “If art is the making of metaphors and architecture
is an art then it too must make metaphors”. But until now, aside from this logic we have not shown the informal logic,
argument and evidence of this proposition. The axioms also warrant the
inference connecting the evidence to the claim and is a deduction generalizing
from specific evidence to the topoi.
The below is an excerpt from my monograph of paradigms and axioms about
architecture based on Metaphor and
Thought. In each of the below cases I have fist paraphrased the scientist's
conclusions and based on a notable commonality to architecture, described an
architectural process or product in the terms of each finding. Out of these comparisons I derived topoi (3.0 A
traditional theme or motif; a literary convention.) which we can use to
describe architecture.
Scientist's conclusions
and based on a notable commonality to architecture:
Generative metaphor2: A
perspective on problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon
Generative
metaphor and the “parte”: In his “paintbrush as
pump” discussion as a metaphor Schon
claims that by attaching to the paintbrush the “way” (processes) of a pump the researchers were
able to better improve the design of the paintbrush as an instrument which
pumps paint on the surface. By describing painting in an unfamiliar
way they were able to make dominant what was already somewhat known. They then
saw the brush as a pump. Before then they seemed to be different things now
they were the same. To arrive at this conclusion they had to observe the working
of the brush and make the observation and then apply it to the mechanism. The
paintbrush was now seen as a pump and the act of painting, pumping. Schon
refers to this a generative metaphor.
The generative
metaphor2 is the name for a process of symptoms of a particular kind of
seeing-as, the “meta-pherein” or “carrying –over” of frames or perspectives
from one domain of experience to another. This process he calls generative which
many years earlier 2.0 WJ Gordon called the Metaphoric Way of Knowing
and 2.1 Paul Weiss called associations.
In this sense both in
interior design and architecture after assimilating the program the very first
step in the design process is to develop a “parte’ (An ex parte
presentation is a communication directed to the merits or outcome of a
proceeding …it’s the resolution of the argument consisting of claims,
inferences, evidence and warrants to the inference) .
It is a
“top-down” approach later followed by designs which meet the parte. The parte
may follow the design process and be presented to sell the product.
Commercial
retail shops maximize both visual and physical access to their merchandise by
the use of glass and positioning entrances convenient to potential shoppers’
paths of travel. Attached or detached the idea of the shop as a flickering
flame and welcoming transformed shops prior image as formidable container into
which one ventured for surprise and possible revelation. With this is in mind
designers of malls extend this accessibility to nodes on highways to be close
to their prime markets. Commercial retail is now perceived as an attractive
recreational experience and as such provides shoppers with a secondary
perception of the metaphor; shoppers now “carry-over” from play, rest and
relaxation to fulfilling their needs and necessities. “Michael Angelo” mall in
Qatar is designed in a Renaissance style with a huge domed entry, shop facades
and themes of the period, paintings, sculptures and decoration reminding
patrons that they are as royalty and in the lap of luxury. This was also
adopted by the Loews theater chain when all of their theaters were decorated
with red velvet wallpaper, huge mahogany Tudor chairs; chandeliers, plush
Aubusson rugs, beautiful crystal and porcelain lamps and accessories.
During the depression and recovery patrons would come and spend the day in the
theater (Palace was not just the name of one of the down town theaters but its
description) to not only see the movie, but buy refreshments and lounge in the
many beautiful parlors and lounges.
In the
middle of the twentieth century William Levitt revolutionized and created the
home building business as an industry applying mass production of the home
ideal containing what the Park Ave penthouses had; built-in closets, complete
kitchens with dishwashers, and even better, an attached garage. Not only that
but every single house was identical so that all were part of a harmonious
single minded community. It was called Levittown, the miracle suburb on
Long Island that opened the way for the middle class to move out of New York
City. They came to escape crowds and own their own home, cook with their own
appliances and mow their own lawns. They had GI loans in hand, babies on the way, and a ‘50's brand of pioneering
spirit.
Similar stories can be told of the way the modern office
building was catapulted by Otis’s invention of the fly–wheel elevator and the
conversion from iron to steel for building structures. These inventions increased real estate profits
in as many as there are layers by building office space in layers up to the sky
as zoning, elevator and engineering would allow.
3.0 “Argumentation: The
Study of Effective Reasoning, 2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky of
Northwestern University and published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of
Chantilly, Virginia
4.0 WWW; “In Europe the Grand Central Railroad Terminal
were built and then a clone brought to New York City as part of the Park Ave Manhattan Development Project
including ten underground floors bringing freight, shopping, auto parking, etc
underground and into the center of the city providing a hub extending from the
thirties up to the nineties under Park Ave. This grand scheme was only
partially carried out but forever transformed Park Avenue from a boulevard of
swanky three story mansions to a sophisticated high-rent district of high-rise
residences and prestigious office buildings.
The
first Grand Central Terminal was built in 1871 by shipping and railroad magnate
Cornelius Vanderbilt. A "secret" sub-basement known as M42 lies under
the Terminal, containing the AC to DC converters used to supply DC traction current to the
Terminal designed to replicate the galleried hall of a 13th-century Florentine
palace. The train shed, north and east of the head house, had two innovations in U.S.
practice: the platforms were elevated to the height of the cars, and the roof
was a balloon shed with a clear span over all of the tracks.
In
order to accommodate ever-growing rail traffic into the restricted Midtown area,
William J. Wilgus, chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad took advantage
of the recent electrification technology to propose a novel scheme: a bi-level
station below ground. Arriving trains would go underground under Park Avenue,
and proceed to an upper-level incoming station if they were mainline trains or
to a lower-level platform if they were suburban trains. In addition, turning
loops within the station itself obviated complicated switching moves to bring
back the trains to the coach yards for servicing. Departing mainline trains reversed
into upper-level platforms in the conventional way. Necessity being the mother
of invention burying electric trains underground brought an additional
advantage to the railroads: the ability to sell above-ground air rights over the tracks and platforms for
real-estate development. With time, all the area around Grand Central saw
prestigious apartment and office buildings being erected, which turned the area
into the most desirable commercial office district of Manhattan”.
In each
of the above instances a metaphor was created by attaching another concept to
the primary function. Once the projects were thought of in that added way the
metaphor was born and under it the many metaphorical spin-offs and sub-metaphors.
Not to
mention the metaphor of the Empire State and the overall iconic image of
Manhattan and it’s New York State. Even today when we say New York we mean
downtown Manhattan. The city is” being pumped” by its metaphors.
The
conduit metaphor.: “A case of frame
conflict in our language about language”: by Michael J. Reddy.
A dead metaphor. is one which really does not contain any fresh
metaphor insofar as it does not really “get thoughts across”; “language
seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental
stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone’s else’s
thoughts”.
The
landscape is replete with an infinite number of inane replicas which render
readers dull, passive and disinterested (How many times will you read the same
book?) Mass housing, commercial office buildings and highways
are the main offenders leaving the owner designed and built residence, office,
factory, fire station, pump house, as unique and delightful relief’s in an
otherwise homogenized context. The reader stops reading because it is the same
as before. Not reading the copy yet seeing the copy and the collective of
copies focuses rather on the collective as the metaphor as the overall project
which also may be “dead”.
In its
time, Levittown’s uniqueness and the sub-structures sameness were its’
metaphor. It was alive and today still lives as new residents remodel upgrade
and exhume their “dead” to become a “living” metaphor.
Disregarding
this, the architects of public housing created dead metaphors and blamed the
lack of pride of ownership for their (the projects, the architects, the public
housing authority, and the federal housing authority and US congress) failure. In revitalization, teams of
revivalist have discovered there is more than turf and proprietorship.
Peculiarization, personalization and authentication are required for a metaphor
to live. In this is the art of making metaphors for the architect of public
works. His metaphor must “read” the cultural, social and rightness of the
metaphor’s proposed context. In modern architecture no one was better able than
Phillip Johnson in his Seagram Building and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).
Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his
masterpiece was the Glass House (1949) he designed as his own
residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a
profoundly influential work.
The
concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views as its real “walls” had
been developed by many authors in the German Glasarchitektur drawings of the
1920s, and already sketched in initial form by Johnson's mentor Mies. The
building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the
effects of transparency and reflection. Johnson was the head of my Yale thesis
jury and my primary design associate on a project in Puerto Rico and when I
returned to Manhattan he invited me to work with him on the design of Roosevelt
Island.
Defining
the operation of metaphor Reddy says that 1.2.2 “a conduit
is a minor framework which overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and
feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied into a kind of ambient
space between human heads. There are also individual pipes which allow mental
content to escape into, or enter from, this ambient space. Thoughts and
feelings are reified into an external 1.2.3 “idea
space” and where thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so
that they exist independent of any need for living human beings to think or
feel them”. This most closely resembles works of architecture and what
goes inside and outside works. “Somewhere we are peripherally aware that words
do not really have insides (“it is quit
foreign to common sense to think of words as having “insides” ……………major
version of the metaphoric in which thoughts and emotions are always contained
in something”) . In his examples one can see a variety of putting ideas onto
paper meaning that the ideas are out of the head of the creator and onto paper
to be read and then transferred.
Architecturally this is best reflected in the example
pointed out by Vincent Scully describing the geometry of urban blocks and the
location of building masses that reflect one anther is geometry to sharply
define the volume and mass of the block and experience of city streets. The
streets are defined by the 90 degree corners, planes and tightness of the cubes
and rectangles to the city plan. In this way the metaphor of the overall and
each building design no matter where it’s
location on the block; no matter when or in what sequence the metaphoric constraint
appropriateness, zoning formulas, all lead the ideas to flow from one to another architect. Furthermore, the reader
is able to “appreciate” the street, its geometry, limits and linearity as an
idea on the conduit from the architect, through the metaphor and to the reader.
Likewise a visit to the Tyrol will immediately locate the
conduit of design style as practically all chalets, houses and villas have
identical roofs, walls, balconies, windows, flower boxes and doors. The conduit
dominates and connectors builders, designers, contractors, suppliers and
buyers.
That conduit is the dominant theme that unites all
the villages. Interior decoration in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the middle of
the twentieth century was dominated by wall to wall drapes, cornices, valences,
upholstered furniture covered with slip covers, ketch and bric-a-brac figures
and “charkas” known affectionately as “Bronx Renaissance”. The conduit that
connected these outcomes were a system of
city-wide gift stores, national gift market, central fabric suppliers and
workshops and the heroic drapery hangers (of which I was one) completed their
work.
Conduit
is the parte and design system from which choices in structure, finishes,
colors, textures, etc. follow. A really good design and good designer can
produce a set of documents and its detail follows easily as a development of
the logic found in the whole.
In Programs and Manifestoe4.
s on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad'
writes: 4. “It's a strange thought, that
culture is a product of man-made, unnatural things, that instead of culture
shaping the architecture, it is the architecture (the environment) that shapes
the culture. I would guess it makes sense after some x amount of years....maybe
its in cycles: At first, culture creates the architecture, years pass by, and then the
architecture-environment modifies the culture. Then new modified culture
creates new architecture, etc.
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?”
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?”
The affect of the metaphor on
other metaphors with all its links and consequences is manifest in the conduit
which leads to one after the other and a continuation of the first.
The contemporary theory of
metaphor 5. by George Lakoff:
About
novel images and image metaphors he quotes Andre Breton’s “My wife 5. ……whose waist
is an hourglass” he says: “By
mapping the structure of one domain onto the structure of another”, “This
is a superimposition of the image of an hour glass onto the image of a
woman’s waist by virtue of their common shape. As before the metaphor is
conceptual; it is not the works themselves, but the metal images.
Here,
we have the mental image of an hour glass and of a woman and we map the middle
of the hourglass into the waist of the woman. The words are prompts for us to
map from one conventional image to another”. Lakoff concludes that “ all
metaphors are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each
metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” Likewise when we look
at the geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those
common elements where fit, coupling and joints occur. We remember that which
exemplified the analogous match.
This
observation of the metaphor finds that the commonality, commonplace and
similarity are the chief focus of the metaphor. As Frank Lloyd Wright designed
his Prairie Architecture with dominant
horizontal axis thrust to his structure as common to the horizontal axis of the
land upon which the building sits. Thus the two horizontal axis, the land and
then the building were wed by their commonality of horizontality. In a city of sky-scrapers architects parallel their
new shafts with those adjacent with space between to form the architectonic of
verticality, canyons and shafts where the commonalty of all the vertical shafts
bind them together. The red tile roofs of the Italian Riviera, California’s
Mission Architecture are other such examples of commonalities; commonalities
which are synonymous with their identity and expected class.
We note the 90 degree angles and shape that slide into one
another. We note the way like- metals, clips and angles fit; the way ceiling
ducts are made to fit between structures and hung ceiling, etc. While it is
less possible when we circulate through its halls, rooms and closets to
spontaneously imagine the way we could relate the human form to a building.
Yet, it's accommodation to our needs and necessities to our self preservation
and the maintenance of the building become apparent. We can map the building
structure to ours by finding the one commonality amongst all the others. Very
often we will hear someone say this place is” me”. The common image has been
located and the fit made.
Describing
generic specific structure he notes that they are under the Invariance
Principle and concludes that the way to arrive at generic-level schemes for
some knowledge structure is to extract its image its image-schematic structure.
This is called the Generic is Specific Structure. He adds that it is an
extremely common mechanism for comprehending the general from the specific. So what you can deduce for part you can assume
is true of the whole.
So if
the facade of building is in one order of architecture, vernacular, and
building system you can presume the other parts are in a like arrangement and
that the whole is of the classic order including its plan, section and details.
What are involved here are mapping, channeling and one idea from one level to
another.
According
to Lakoff 5. “plausible accounts
rather than scientific results” is why we have conventional metaphors and
why conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mappings than another.
An architectural work establishes its own vocabulary which once
comprehended become the way in which we experience the work, finding its
discrepancies and fits and seeking the first and all the other similar
elements. We do judge the work as to have consistency, integrity and
aesthetics. Buildings which do not have these characteristics do not work as
metaphors.
The
relevance of studying architecture as the making of metaphors is to
provide practitioners, owners, and mainly those that shape the built
environment that they have a somber and serious responsibility to fill our
world with meaning and significance, That what they do matters as in this first
of Layoff’s results (Please note the application of Layoff’s vocabulary, definitions
and descriptions related to linguistics metaphorically applied to
architecture): Summary of results:
1.
Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts
and perform abstract reasoning 5.. For example,
as this is so for linguistics(spoken or written), then I infer that it must be
true for non linguistics ,and I give as evidence the built habitats and their
architectural antecedents, being as how what is built is first thought and
conceived separately from building as thinking and conceiving is separate from
the outward expression . Whether it is one or thousands public cultures is
influenced, bound and authenticated by its’ metaphors. Not withstanding
“idolatry”, the metaphors are the
contexts of life’s dramas and as our physical bodies are read by our neighbors
finding evidence for inferences about social, political and philosophical
claims about our culture and its place in the universe.
One of
many warrants is recognizing, and operating the front door of a castle as we
would the front door of our apartment; another warrant is the adaptive uses of
obsolete buildings to new uses as a factory to multi- family residential uses,
etc. We see the common space and structure and reason the building codes
written to protect the health , safety and welfare of the general; public
can be applied and the found to be re-zoned to fit the new uses in the
fabric of the mixed-use zoned area; “comprehend abstract concepts (building
codes, design layouts, and building codes) and perform abstract
reasoning” (design and planning).
2. Much
subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories,
can only be comprehended via metaphor5. , even an anonymous
Florentine back ally’s brick wall, carved door, wall fountain, shuttered
windows, building height, or coloration of the fresco.
3.
Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature5..
After
many years living in Saudi Arabia and Europe and away from Brooklyn I visited Park Slope. I saw the stoops ascending
to their second floors, the carved wood and glass doors, the iron grilles, the
four story walls, the cementous surrounded and conventionally pained widows but
what I saw was only what I described.
4.
Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor..
As language is to speech so are
buildings to architecture where each has a content and inner meaning of the
hole as well as each of its parts. As each word, each attachment, plain,
material, structure had first been conceived to achieve some purpose and fill
some need. Hidden from the reader is the inner psychology, social background,
etc of the man when speaking and the programming deign and contacting process
from the reader of a building metaphor. As in completing an argument the reader
perceives the inferences with its warrants and connects the evidence of the
seen to the claims to make the resolution of the whole, all of which are
surmised from the surface.
5. through
much of our conceptual system is metaphorical; a significant part of it is
non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical
understanding5..
The science of the strength of
materials, mathematics, structures, indeterminate beams, truss design,
mechanical systems, electricity, lighting, etc. are each understood metaphorically
and their precepts applied metaphorically but with often random selections, trials
and feasibility are random and rather in search of the metaphor without knowing
it is or is not a match and fit to be part of the metaphor at hand. On the
other hand we may select one or another based on non-metaphorical, empirical
tests and descriptions of properties. We then try to understand the metaphor in
the selection, its commonality, how it contributes to the new
application, how its properties within itself
which are alone, strange and unrelated;
yet, when coupled with the whole or part of the created metaphor
contribute to metaphor.
For
example, in the last 20 years store front's tempered glass has been enhanced,
thickened, strengthen and is now used in large quantities as frameless curtain
walls on private and massive public properties. A non-metaphorical building
product with one used in one context has been taken out of a non-metaphorical
understanding of properties and use to apply to another. Our primary
experiences grounded in the laws of physics of gravity , plasticity,
liquids, winds, sunlight, etc all contribute to our metaphorical understanding
often the conceptual commonality accepting the strange .
In Belize, faced with a an
unskilled workforce and the government wanting fancy houses for its government
staff I choose a plethora of pre-engineered building components from non
architectural catalogs as gigantic drainage pipes , sawn in half and used
for roofs and in Tennessee relocated the country look of indignities building
with US Plywood's "texture 1-11".
6. Metaphor
allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured
subject matter in terms of a more concrete or at least more highly structured
subject matter5..
Owner occupied specialized
works of architectural metaphors may begin with long periods of research,
observations, and analysis ; conclusions and redesign and re-thinking of
existing or utility of new systems; setting our system feasibility, pricing and
meeting budgets, planning and programming, diagramming and design of sub-systems
and systems but when complete the metaphor is accessible, usable and
compatible.
The
whole of the metaphor is designed in such a way as to clarify, orient and
provide “concrete” reification of all the design parameters into a “highly
structured’ work, a work which homogenizes all these diverse and disjointed
systems and operations into a well working machine. Building types such as
pharmaceutical, petrochemical laboratories, data research centers, hospitals,
space science centers, prisons, etc. are
such relatively abstract unstructured uses which only careful assembly can
order. Faced with both housing and creating identify the Greeks and the Romans
derived an Order of Architecture
which we now call the Classical order of
Architecture.
A
classical order (of which Egypt was the first) is one of the ancient styles of
building design in the classical tradition, distinguished by their
proportions and their characteristic profiles and details, but most quickly
recognizable by the type of column and capital employed. Each style also has its
proper entablature, consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice. From the sixteenth century
onwards, theorists recognized five classical orders.
From
its inception design professionals will look outside of their field and the
field of the proposed project to find organism, technologies provides a
conceptual handle as the inner working of microchips, mainframes, submarines,
rockets and jet propulsion, circus, markets, battleships and air-craft
carriers, etc.
Long
before the common use of computers, and after faced with the complex ways that teams of service clerks communicating on the
phone, accessing and sharing files and instantly recording all transactions, I
invented a huge a round table where all clerks would be facing the center where
would be sitting a kind of “Lazy Susan”. I choose the Lazy Suzan because of my experience in Chinese restaurants and
selling Lazy Suzan’s as a young sales assistant in a gift store in the Bronx.
As a result of the overall design of which this was one part the company’s
business increased and prospered. The commonplace was the central and revolving
common tray which now contained stacked file dividers instead of dishes of shared food, where sharing at randoim
was the commonality. One of the
executive vice presidents befriended me and later went on to head the New York
Stock Exchange. The installation was a success and was used until the company
closed its doors many years later.
The
below italics are by Lakoff 5..
Layoff’s
observations emphasize the instinctive, impulsive and intuitive nature of the
architect’s metaphor that takes place in its creation and use. Like the onomatopeics metaphors Lakoff’s. mappings of conceptions override the overt
spoken and descriptive and rely much more on mnemonics (something intended to
assist the memory, as a verse or formula). However, for Lakoff the assistance
comes from something much more primordial (constituting a beginning; giving
origin to something derived as an form of life) to the society’s experiences.
These become the matrix
(encyclopedic) of schemas (in argument; the warrants {where a warrant is a
license to make an inference and as such must have reader's agreement}
supporting the inferences {mappings} wherein the metaphor becomes real). In
this way the reader maps, learns and personalizes the strange into the realm of
the familiar. The reader does so by the myriad of synaptic connections he is
able to apply to that source. Hence architects translate their
architectural conception from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two
dimensionally scaled drawings and then to real-life full-scale multi-dimensional
conventions consisting of conventional materials and building elements (doors,
windows, stairs, etc).
As maps
are the result of cartographers rendering existing into a graphics for reading
so is mapping to the reading of metaphors where the reader renders
understanding from one source to another. Doing so mentally and producing a
rendition of understanding (as a pen and ink of a figure) not as a graphic but
a conceptual understanding.
Reader
sees in a critical way the existing culling through and encyclopedia of
referents to make the true relationship; the mapping which best renders the
reality; the relationship which informs and clarifies as the map the location,
configuration and characteristic of the reality. As the cartographer seeks
lines, symbols and shadings to articulate the reality so the reader chooses from
amongst the heretofore unrelated. The seemingly unrelated are found to
have an essence common to both the reality and the rendition so that the
metaphor can be repeated, becoming the
reader’s new vocabulary .
In fact
architects do the opposite as graphic renditions are made of synapses between
amorphic and seemingly desperate information. Yet the process of mapping is no
less intense as architects review the matrix of conditions, operation , ideal
and goals of the thesis to find similarities and differences , commonalities,
and potential for one to resonate with another to make a “resolution” on the
experience of a cognitive mapping which becomes the metaphor, parte and
overwhelming new reality. The new reality is the target of the source and
finally can be read. In the case of the birth of an infant metaphor
readers may find a wide variety of source information which is germane to their
own experience.
Before
the public ever sees the constructed metaphor Building Officials, manufactures,
city planners, owners, estimators, general contractors, specialty contractors,
environmentalist, neighbors and community organization frost read the drawings
and map their observations to their issues to form a slanted version of the
reality. Their mappings are based on the
warrants which they are licensed to perform. Each warrant will support a
different mapping (inference) and result in its own metaphor. In effect each
will see a kind of reality of the proposed in the perspective of their peculiar
warrant, where license is permission from authority to do something. It is
assumed if one gets permission it has met the conditions, operations, ideal and
goals of the proposed metaphor. Mapping is critical at this read to assure that the architect’s
rendering of the program is faithful to the cognitive, lawful, physical and
legal realities. It s like a map which gets tested by scientist, navigators , pilots
and engineers before they build a craft to use the map, or set out on a journey
using the map. Before the contracts start committing men and material the
metaphor must map and be the metaphor meeting all expectations.
Before building, the suppliers,
contractors and specialist make “shop drawings” to map the metaphor and present
the graphic evidence that they can fill their claim to build for
compensation. The architect’s team now gathers reviews and coordinates al
of these warrants to assure their mappings do not interfere, nullify but
additively contribute to the reifying of the source to the target and build the
final product, on time, on budget and within the allowed schedule.
After
opening the public users have the opportunity to map any and all the
information that is superficially available form the shell to its nuts and
bolts. Many enjoy reading the project while it is being constructed to read the
work and conceptualize the final form, the bits and pieces they observe,
mapping a single task to its final outcome and so forth. So the mapping of
construction by onlookers and contractors is all part of the mapping process.
Like a
landscape artist who gathers from the chaos of the nature into selected items
to the artist who organizes into the
canvas so that the viewers will find what the artist saw, and reconstructs, so the architect and the user map their
reality into a metaphor. In this way the conception of the map is the metaphor
and what is made by the cartographer is a "graphic" to simplify the
chaos to find the commonality. Sifting through the program the architect
seeks the “commonality” between the reality and experience to make the
metaphor. Mapping is only possible when we know the “commonplace”, the
commonality, the characteristic common to both, the terms that both the source
and the target have in common that the mapping takes place.
As the architect structures his
program, design and specifications he simultaneously structures the metaphor of
his work of architecture. Architecture consists of program specifics where the
conditions, operations, goals and ideals are from heretofore unrelated and
distant contexts but are themselves metaphors “mapped across conceptual
domains” 5.. He searches
and constructs the porject’s parte.
As the
architectural program the mappings are asymmetric and partial. The only
regular pattern is their irregularity, and, like a person can be read and
understood, once one is familiar with the personality and character,
vocabulary and references, and of course the context and situation of the work,
the work can also be read and understood. About Lakoff, in cognitive linguistics conceptual metaphor,
or cognitive metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea or conceptual domain in terms of another, for
example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are
rising"). Therefore a conceptual
domain can be any coherent organization of human experience.
The
regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which
often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the
mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.
This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first
extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work 1.4.9 Metaphors
We Live By. Other cognitive scientists study
subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels "analogy"
and "conceptual blending."
Lakoff continues:
7. Each mapping5. (where mapping is the systematic
set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source
and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from source
domains and are not preexisting. To know a conceptual metaphor is to know the
set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing. The same idea of
mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical
reasoning and inferences) is a fixed set of ontological (relating to essence
or the nature of being) correspondences between entities in source domain and
entities in target domain.
*love is a journey.
Life is a journey
Social organizations are plants
Love is war
There is a list of over 100
schemas in many categories about basic human behavior, reactions and actions5..
These schemas are the realms in which the mappings takes place much the same as
the inferences in arguments have warrants and link evidence to claims so do
these schemas, architects carry-over their experiences with materials, physics,
art, culture, building codes, structures, plasticity, etc. to form metaphor.
Identifying conditions, operations, ideals and goals are combined to form
plans, sections and elevations which are then translated in to contract
documents. Later the contractors map this metaphor based on their schemes of
cost, schedule and quality control into schedules and other control documents.
It is not until equipment, laborers and materials are brought to the site that
the manifestation of the metaphor starts to form. Once formed the only evidence
for the user (reader) are the thousands of cues from every angle, outside and
inside to enable use and understanding.
The
latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete
experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding
abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in
which the conceptual metaphor is used.
Operationally, the
work’s entrance is the first clue about the sequence of experiences of the
metaphor taking us to the anticipated lobby, then reception followed by
sequences of increasingly private (non-communal) and remote areas until
reaching the terminal destination. The very size, context and location is
couple with theme of parks, gated communities, skyscraper’s roof tops and
cladding becoming a metaphor. The very outer edges of a metaphor portends of
its most hidden content. Once we understand the metaphor and the mapping from
the context to the form the mapping continues from entrance to the foyer and
mapping from the context and cladding to every detail. We carry-over and map
the metaphor as we delve deeper into its content and inner context always
mapping the first to the current metaphor.
In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL)
refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation,
learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition
in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First,
it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind;
second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third,
it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use5..
Therefore
the metaphor of architecture is inherent not in the media of the building’s
presence, parts or bits and pieces but in the mind of the reader and that the
articulation of the metaphor as thinking and third that our use of the metaphor
increases our knowledge of the metaphor and reading metaphors comes out of
practice. The more we view paintings, ballets, symphonies, poetry, and
architecture the better we become at their understanding. Its metaphor further
dwells in the reader while the building and its parts exist without necessarily
being understood. As the writer of the
speech extrapolates so does the architect and the speaker as the reader of the
metaphor where the metaphor can only be experienced to be understood.
Walk though an unlit city at
night and feel the quite of the building’s voices because the readers have no
visual information and with access to the closed buildings the metaphor is a
potential while being a reality. Yet the potential for cognition does exist and
is real but will not understood apart
from its experience.
Humans interact with their
environments based on their physical dimensions, capabilities and limits. The
field of anthropometric (human measurement) has
unanswered questions, but it's still true that human physical characteristics
are fairly predictable and objectively measurable. Buildings scaled to human
physical capabilities have steps, doorways, railings, work surfaces, seating,
shelves, fixtures, walking distances, and other features that fit well to the
average person5..
Humans also interact with their
environments based on their sensory capabilities. The fields of human
perception systems, like perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology, are not exact
sciences, because human information processing is not a purely physical act,
and because perception is affected by cultural factors, personal preferences,
experiences, and expectations, so human scale in architecture can also describe
buildings with sightlines, acoustic properties, task lighting, ambient
lighting, and spatial grammar that fit well with human senses. However, one
important caveat is that human perceptions are always going to be less predictable
and less measurable than physical dimensions. 5.
Basically the scale of
habitable metaphors is the intrinsic relation between the human figure and his
surroundings as measured, proportioned and sensed. It is dramatically
represented by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (see below illustration) is
based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by
the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, representation of the human
figure encircled by both a circumference encapsulating its’ feet to its
outstretched fingertips where part is then encased in a square5..
This scale
is read in elevations, sections, plans, and whole and based realized in the
limited and bound architectural space. These spaces and their variations of
scale are where the reader perceives the architectural metaphors of
compression, smallness, grandeur, pomposity, equipoise, balance, rest,
dynamics, direction, staticness, etc. In his Glass House, Phillip Johnson
extended that space to the surrounding nature, making the walls the grass and
surrounding trees, St. Peter’s interiors is a Piranesi space. (The Prisons
(Carceri d'invenzione or 'Imaginary Prisons'), is a series of 16 prints
produced in first and second states that show enormous subterranean vaults with
stairs and mighty machines.
Piranesi vision
takes on a Kafkaesque and Escher-like distortion, seemingly erecting
fantastic labyrinthian structures, epic in volume, but empty of purpose. They
are cappricci -whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and
ruin). Many of my pen and ink drawings were inspired by the Piranesi
metaphor. In St. Peters the spaces are so real that they imply the
potential for all mankind to occupy. The scale of the patterns on the floor are
proportional to the height and widths enclosing the space they overwhelm the
human figure as does the Baldachino whose height soars but is well below the
dome covering the building.
The metaphor is instinctively
perceived, mapped and sorted by mnemonic schemas as is New York’s Radio city
Music Hall designed by my former employer Edward
Durrell Stone and the entrance to the Louver by IM Pei. The surrounds of offices and shops by Michael Angelo feature window and door propositionally designed to
man’s scale and perfectly mitigate the universal scale of the Piazza did San
Marco (St. Marks Plaza). Recalling the plazas of Italy Stone designed and I
developed the State University of New
York in Albany (SUNY) which featured metered arches, columns and pilasters
on buildings to mitigate the various scales of both the large and small plazas.
My
interview for the job where Bob Smith, his office manager, proudly
entertained Mr. Stone and his board with an array of my portfolio covering all
four walls of his executive conference room. The project gave me the
opportunity to plan, design and details many plazas, monumental and convenience
stairs as well as the way they would be enclosed and encased to demark the
plazas, plinths, terraces and porticos of the galleries and circulation areas.
Like Radio City this project was a grand public works metaphor recalling the
Parthenon, Rome, Venice and the many tiny urban villages I had visited
including Lucca, Sienna, Florence, etc. My book on 72 European cities includes
many pen and ink drawings of each city.
The below is where human scale
in architecture is deliberately violated:
For
monumental effect. Buildings, statues, and memorials are constructed in a scale
larger than life as a social/cultural signal that the subject matter is also
larger than life. An extreme example is the Statue of Liberty, the Washington
Monument, etc.
For
aesthetic effect. Many architects, particularly in the Modernist
movement, design buildings that prioritize structural purity and clarity of
form over concessions to human scale. This became the dominant American
architectural style for decades. Some notable examples among many are Henry Cobb's John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei's
work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
To
serve automotive scale. Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible
from roadways assume a radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish
about 3 objects or features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a
100-foot (30-meter) length of department store can perceive about 68 features;
a driver passing the same frontage at 30 mph (13 m/s or 44 ft/s) can perceive
about six or seven features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and
shallow, readable at a glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage
with bigger letters and fewer words. This urban form is traceable back to the
innovations of developer A. W. Ross along Wilshire
Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1920.
8. Mappings are not
arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in every day experience and knowledge5..
Mapping and making metaphors
are synonymous. The person and not the work make the metaphor. Without the body
and the experience of either the author or the reader nothing is being made.
The thing does not have but the persons have the experiences. As language,
craft, and skills are learned by exercise, repetition and every day application
so are mappings. Mappings are not subject to individual judgment or preference:
but as a result of making seeking and finding the commonality by
practice. Architects learn to associate, create and produce by years of
education and practice while users have a longer history approaching and
mapping for use and recognition. Yet new metaphors are difficult to assimilate
without daily use and familiarity.
Often the owners of new
building will provide its regular occupants with orientation, preliminary field
trips and guided tours. Many buildings restrict users’ access by receptionist,
locked doors and restricted areas.
It is
not hard to experience a built metaphor as it is an ordinary fixture on the
landscape of our visual vocabulary. It has predictable, albeit peculiar and
indigenous characteristics the generic nature of the cues are anticipated.
9. /A
conceptual system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings
which form a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system5..
Over
the year’s society, cultures, families and individuals experience and store a
plethora of mapping routines which are part of our mapping vocabulary. As a
potential user when encountering a new building type such as a hi-tech
manufacturing center we call upon our highly structured subsystem to find
conceptual systems which will work to navigate this particular event. Another
example is as a westerner encountering a Saudi Arab home which divides the
family from the public areas of the house as private. In the high tech building
doors will not open and corridors divert visitors away form sensitive and
secret areas. In the Arab home the visitor is kept in area meant only for
non-family members and where the females may not be seen. There is a common
conventional metaphorical mapping which uses a highly structured subsystem of
the conceptual system. There is a similarity and an ability to accept and the constraints.
The metaphor or the work of architecture includes each and every nut and bolt,
plane and volumes, space and fascia, vent and blower, beam and slab, each with
there mappings parallel to operational sequences, flows representations, openings
and enclosures so that they operate in tandem and compliment one another. The
conventions come from the experiences of doors that open, elevators that work,
stairs that are strong, floors that bear our weight, buildings that don’t
topple, and basic experiences that prove verticality, horizontality, diagonals,
weights of gravity, etc.
And finally Lakoff5. concludes the structure of metaphor claiming
that:
10 There are two types of mappings: conceptual
mappings and image mappings; both obey the Invariance Principle5..
“A. Image metaphors are not exact “look-alikes”;
many sensory mechanisms are at
work, which can be characterized by Langacker’s focal adjustment (selection,
perspective, and abstraction); B. images and Image-schemas are continuous; an
image can be abstracted/schematized to various degrees; and C. image metaphors
and conceptual metaphors are continuous; conceptual metaphorical mapping
preserves image-schematic structure (Lakoff 1990) and image metaphors often
involve conceptual aspects of the source image. (“All metaphors are invariant
with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each metaphorical mapping
preserves image-schema structure:”
Likewise
when we look at the geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we
note those common elements where fitting, coupling and joints occur), again
this simultaneity of ideas and image operating in tandem where we see and know
an idea simultaneously; where the convention of the architectural space and the
metaphor of the conception converge.
Image mappings in
architecture finds schemes from a repertoire of superficial conventions
except in a Japanese or Arab house where we are asked to sit on the floor or
eat without knives and forks or find no room with identifiable modality of uses,
or a palace with only show rooms where living is behind concealed walls. A
hotel’s grand ballroom is both a room in a palace, a place for royalty, we must
be one of them, yet a congregation of guests in black ties and gowns are
contemporary and family celebrating a wedding. Incongruities merge in
continuous and seamless recollections.
In cognitive linguistics, the invariance
principle is a simple attempt to explain similarities and differences between
how an idea is understood in "ordinary" usage, and how it is
understood when used as a conceptual metaphor5..
5. Kövecses (2002: 102)
provides the following example based on the semantics
of the English verb to give.
She gave him a book. (Source
language)
Based on the metaphor causation is transfer we get:
(a) She gave him a kiss.
(b) She gave him a headache.
However, the metaphor does not
work in exactly the same way in each case, as seen in:
(b') She gave him a headache, and
he still has it.
(a') *She gave him a kiss, and
he still has it.
The invariance principle5.
offers the hypothesis that metaphor only maps components of meaning from
the source language that remain coherent in the target context. The components of meaning that
remain coherent in the target context retain their "basic structure"
in some sense, so this is a form of invariance.
Architecturally,
users encounter a habitable metaphor with their experience engrafted in a
particular mapping inherent in their catalog of mappings. This mapping has its
own language , vocabulary say of the way doors, windows floors, stairs and rooms
names work and the user brings this vocabulary into, the target metaphor, say a
new office building.
Of
course there will be all sorts of incongruities, similarities and differences.
However this principle points out that the office building vocabulary will
retain its basic structure. This means that while the vocabulary the user
brings to the target from the source will be unchanged still keeping the images
of doors, windows, etc as they were in the residential the office will be
unchanged and unaffected. For example when an architect designs a bank from his
source in the size, décor and detail of medieval great hall the target of
banking with all its vocabulary of teller windows, manager’s carols, customer’s
areas, vaults, etc will not change into medieval ways of serving, storing and
managing the business.
When I
designed a precinct police station for Bedford Stuyvesant I
brought the community, park and community services onto the street and public
pedestrian sidewalks while housing the police offices, muster and patrol
functions to the back and under the building. While the building metaphor is
now a community service police station mapping components of meaning from the
source language of user and community friendly, human scale, public access and
service which remained in the target police station. The vocabulary of all the
police functions remained coherent, perceived and understood and did not vary.
The problem is particularly interesting when the metaphor of a shopping mall
with commercial retail shops brings its language to a target context of a hotel
with service support. The front and back of the hotel, the rooms and
maintenance and the transience of guest will remain coherent, overlaid with
malls covered, circulation and service area. The separated spaces will face the
ambulatory and be separately accessible to visitors. Such a combination you can
see art work in airport terminals being open shops and passenger circulation to
a common metaphor. The airport is still an airport but an airport with a mall.
The Munich subway and underground shopping center are another such examples.
Underground subway language, structures, ventilation, circulation is sustained
while being influenced but not overriding the source.
Of the eight aspects of
metaphor Lakoff describes the two most applies to architecture which is:
Our
system of conventional metaphor is “alive” in the same sense that our system of
grammatical and phonological (distribution and patterning of speech sounds in a
language and of the tacit rules governing pronunciation.) rules is alive;
namely it is constantly in use, automatically, and below the level
of consciousness and Our metaphor system is central to our understanding of
experience and to the way we act on that understanding 5..
It seems that onomatopeics
are metaphors and can be onomatopoeic (grouping of words that
imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as
"click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz",
"bang", or animal noises such as "oink", "moo",
or "meow") ? In this case an assemblage instead of a sound. As
a non-linguistic it has impact beyond words and is still a metaphor.
Then a
metaphor is much more than the sum of its parts and is beyond any of its
constituent constructions, parts and systems, its very existence a metaphor. In both his
books on Emphatics and Surrogates 6. Dr. Weiss amplified this theory.
Before his death at 101 years
of age completed a book called "Emphatics6.," about the
use of language. Dr. Weiss worked in the branch of philosophy known as
metaphysics, which addresses questions about the ultimate composition of
reality, including the relationship between the mind and matter. He was
particularly interested in the way people related to each other through
symbols, language, intonation, art and music. Emphatics, (2000), which
considers how ordinary experience stands in some dynamic relationship with a
second dimension, which provides focus, interruption, significance, or grounds
for the first.
"Surrogates6.,"
published by Indiana University Press. Weiss says that: “A surrogate is "a
replacement that is used as a means for transmitting benefits from a context in
which its’ user may not be a part”. Architecture’s metaphors bridge from the
program, designs and contactors a shelter and trusted habitat. The user enters
and occupies the habitat with him having formulated but not articulated any its
characteristics. Yet it works. “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of two
sides to a surrogate, the user side and the context side (from which the user is
absent or unable to function). “ Each of us uses others to achieve a benefit
for ourselves. “We have that ability”. “None of us is just a person, a lived
body, or just an organism. We are all three and more. We are singulars who own
and express ourselves in and through them. In my early twenties I diagrammed a
being as “”appetite”, “desire” and “mind”. I defined each and described there
interrelationships and support of one another. Metaphor is one and all of these
and our first experiences of sharing life with in to what are outside of us.
As
Weiss 6. describes our mother language and other primary things we too ascribe
like relations with objects and even buildings assigning them the value from
which we may benefit and which may support. As Weiss proclaims that we cannot
separate these three from each other so that it follows that we may find it
impossible to separate us from the external metaphors. Inferences that are not yet warranted can be real even before
we have the evidence. Metaphors are accepted at face value and architecture is
accepted at face value. Weiss:” It is surely desirable to make a good use of
linguistic surrogates”. “A common language contains many usable surrogates with
different ranges, all kept within the limited confines that an established
convention prescribes”
It is
amazing how that different people can understand one another and how we can
read meaning and conduct transaction with non-human extents, hence
architecture. Architecture is such a “third party” to our experience yet
understandable and in any context. In his search for what is real Weiss says he
has explored the large and the small and the relationships that realities have
to one another. Accustomed to surrogates6. architecture is made by assuming these
connections are real and have benefit. Until they are built and used we trust
that they will benefit the end user.
Assembling
the ambulatory we assume the occupancy, frequency and destinations. We each are
surrogates to one another yet fitted into one message. When this passage had
been used as read as had been other passages, corridors and links. Like a
linguistic the building stands, like a great, stone dagger, emphatic against
the sky. The stair, the exit, the space calls, gives emphasis and is strongly
expressive.
Despite
their styles, periods, specific operations, conditions, operations and goals;
despite their building types, country, national language, weather , climate,
culture, etc. doors, openings, windows, stairs, elevators, floors, walls,
roofs, ramps, landscaping, cladding, decoration, furniture, curtains, etc are
all immediately understood and mapped from past to present , from other to
present context and form individual to community of uses. A door in a private
house is a door in a public concert hall. In fact its differences are naturally
assimilated and unconsciously enjoyed.
Metaphor, induction, and social
policy: The convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert J.
Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro 7
Elegant architectural metaphors
are those in which the big idea and the smallest of details echo and reinforce
one another. Contemporary architects wrapping their parte in “green”,
“myths” and eclectic images” are no less guilty than was their predecessors of
the Bauhaus exuding asymmetry, tension and dissonance as were the classics and
renaissance insisting on unity, symmetry and balance. Both the architects’ ant
the public could not help but know the rules and seek confirmation from one end
to the other. The architect’s parte and the user’s grasp of cliché
parte were expected and easy “fill-in” proving the learned mappings,
learned inference trail and familiarity with bridging.
Paraphrasing: 7 “people
ascertain the deep metaphor that underlies one or more surface metaphors by filling
in terms of an implicitly analogy”. It is the “filling in” wherein
the synapse (a region where nerve impulses are transmitted and received,
encompassing the axon terminal of a neuron that releases neurotransmitters in
response to an impulse) takes place.
Synapse is metaphor where two
are joined togethe7r as the side-by-side association of
homologous paternal and maternal chromosomes during the first prophase of
meiosis. How this happens is as biblical as: “faith is the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” where our mental associations are
themselves the metaphor, the evidence of the works we do not actually
see. We see the metaphor, we read its extent, we synapse, analogies
and metaphorize absorbing its information, contextualizing and as much as
possible and resurrecting its reasons for creation. The architectural
metaphor only speaks through its apparent shape, form, volume, space, material,
etc that the concepts which underlie each are known to the user as they would
to a painting, poem, or concerto.
Furthermore as observation,
analysis and use fill in the gaps users inference the locations of
concealed rooms, passages and supports, the user infers from a typology of the
type a warehouse of expectations and similes to this metaphor from others. In
this way there are the perceived and the representations they perceive
represents which when explored, inert what we call beautiful, pleasurable and
wonderful7.
So while architecture is the
making of metaphors and architects are making metaphors their works,
though metaphoric, are not themselves the metaphors but the shadow of the
metaphor which exists elsewhere in the minds of both the creator and the user.
Architects would not be known as artist nor should their works be known as works
of art. Both their works are the “deep” while the owners deal with the
“surface”; the true architectural artisan has deep and underlying
metaphors predicated two and three dimensional space analysis, history,
culture, class, anthropology, geography etc. They all are often underlying the
surface of the choices of lighting, material, claddings, etc.
In a discussion of theories
of representation Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro7
proposes that a spatial representation in which local subspaces can be
mapped into points of higher-order hyper-spaces and vice versa and that is
possible because they have a common set of dimensions. 7
In this
way the many architectural elements are fitted and combine to make a unity. It can
be argued that the seen is not at all the metaphor but the transfers, bridges
and connections being made apart from the building. In filling in the terms of
the analogy lies the metaphor. My design of a New Haven Cultural Center Concert
Hall brought the visitors form entrances on the plaza under the stage and
orchestra and up a ramp into the theatre facing the audience where they would
be after socializing. One seated they world be watching the stage and the very
access back to the street. This would also be the place where refreshments were
served and all would observe. The audience was planned to be the entertainment
along with the musicians on stage. The architects have tools to control the
metaphor and allow the users to replay precisely what was intended by the
architect. My proposal for an exhibit called: Contemporary Theories of the
Universe” consisted of a giant sphere enclosing a continuous ramp on the
inner circumference going from top to bottom around a three dimensional mobile
of our galaxy. The entry elevators brought visitors to the top and as they made
their way down they could see were overhead and side exhibits telling the story
of the various theories of cosmology and the creation of the universe. From the
metaphor of the idea, a sphere containing the universe about the universe to
the design of the entrance, elevators, ramps, exhibits and central galaxy the
mapping of the experience was from the design to the perception. (P.S. Many
years later I was to find one of my former professors design a similar building
for the New York City Museum of Natural History as an adjunct the to the famous
Hayden Planetarium) .
Figurative speech and
linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock8. apologizes for the inconsistencies, lack of
derivatives and many unexplained changes in linguistics to explain the way
metaphor is used and understood, misused and misunderstood.
Likewise,
the street talk that permeated my childhood was a string of “sayings, clichés,
proverbs and European linguistic slang. This was contrasted by the poetry of
songs and medieval literature. The architecture was the only source of my
identity having consistency, reputation and allusions toward science, logic and
consequence.
I just
know there was something out side of this circus. Although I could not derive
what I saw I could document and retain the types and details of each type. My
hunger and thirst to know what, why and how to make these spurned each morning
waking before dawn and doing reconnaissance from the time I was three till I
was in my teens.
My
tours were capricious and free roaming (my version of play) but not my
curiosity where the metaphors fed me with my identity and certainty of a
reality. The neighborhood authenticated my persona, family and location. Later
my study of architecture was organically adjunctive while reason for study was
to further my own metaphor. Figurative or not , the metaphors I perceived then
are still my “boiler-plate” and when I scrutinized and sketched over seventy
European cities I was able to find metaphors, similes, and analogies. All was
helped by preceding studies under architectural historians as: Ross, Popiel,
Maholy Nage and Vincent Scully (to name a few).
However,
Sadock’s examples and apologies only remind me that my work to derive the
phenomenon of architecture as the making of metaphors is in its’
infancy, beginning to develop a vocabulary and understanding for the
architectural profession and its’ allies. There are none known to me that today
regards the social psychological building metaphors in a way that translates
into practice. As a result, as Sadock bemoans he also apologizes for the
inconsistencies, lack of derivatives and many unexplained changes in
linguistics.
He thus discusses the difference
between the indirect use of metaphor versed the direct use of language to
explain the world. 8..
In some
circles this is referred to tangential thinking, that approaching a subject
from its edges without getting to the point. Users can accept works which are
vague, inane, and non-descript, evasive, and disorienting. Public housing,
“ticky-tack” subdivisions, anonymous canyons of plain vanilla towers with
countless nameless windows, offices with a sea of desks, nameless workstations
and the daunting boredom of straight highways on a desert plain. This too
applies to works of architecture which assembles a minimum and constructs the
minimum in a stoic fashion considering the least needed to produce a work that
fills the minimum economy of its commission. As such many architectural works escape
the many and various realities settling for a minimum of expression of and
otherwise prolific potential.
He distinguishes and draws
relationships between micro and macro metaphors and the way they can inform one
another as the form of design may refer to its program, or a connector may
reflect the concept of articulation as a design concept.8. The
way one 45 degree angle may reflect all the buildings geometry. More the way
the design concept, design vision drawn on a napkin can be the vision, gestalt,
formulae, and “grand design” of a particular project. Such an ideal can be the
seed, fountainhead and rudder guiding all other design decisions.
The macro metaphor drives the
micro while they both inform one another. Classic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman,
Empire, Bedemier, Renaissance, Modern, Baroque, Rocco, Gothic, Tudor, etc are
examples of styles and periods where a macro design imperative controlled micro
decisions. And, vice versa, where construction means and methods determined
certain design and style as the flying buttress and buttress of the Gothic’s,
the arch for the Romans.
The
renaissance not only was informed by discoveries of the Roman classics but by
the intellectual and spiritual exuberance so well rendered in music, art, sculpture
and in architecture by the eccentric articulation and bulging of figures in
pediments, capitals and the form of the plans and sections.
Likewise the macro8. Bauhaus and its principles doggedly produced
the architecture of Mies, Johnson, Breuer, Corbusier, Gropius, and Meier
turning away from fanciful experimentation, and turned toward rational,
functional, sometimes standardized building. In a lesser way the design
vernacular of Frank Lloyd Wright was a macro design approach from which micro
design of particular spaces, details and decoration.
Some problems with the emotion
of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart 9. are
“primarily interested in the mechanisms whereby meanings are conveyed”. He
makes several observations relevant to our study.
Discussing the idioms and
informal expressions such as turn on the lights;” kick the bucket” he notes
Metaphors work by “reference to
analogies that are known to relate to the two domains” 9.. In
other words there is apriori knowledge of these before they are spoken and when
heard they are immediately found. Like a building metaphor’s common elements
with an uncommon application the common connects to the unfamiliar and the
architect is able to find a way to bring them together and the user discovers
their relevance.
Metaphor by John R. Searle10. is concerned with “how
metaphors work”. As we are concerned with how architectural metaphors work we
can draw some analogies.
A” problem of the metaphor
concerns the relations between the word and sentence meaning, on the one hand,
and speaker’s meaning or utterance meaning, on the other” “Whenever we
talk about the metaphorical meaning of a word, expression, or sentence, we are
talking about what a speaker might utter it to mean, in a way it that departs
from what the word, expression or sentence actually means”. 10.
With
the exception of major corporate brands, churches, specialty building in
architecture the examples is in infinite as most works designed are with no
intended message, meaning or referent. Many are in the class of others of its
types and generally convey their class while others are replicas and based on a
model. Furthermore most architects have a design vocabulary which is foreign to
the user. Conversely, in public buildings, the user’s expectations, use and
expectations are foreign to the architect. At its best the architect may
connect the vocabulary of his design to some exotic design theory which,
results I a very beautiful and appealing building to which the user finds
beautiful but has no idea about the intended making of the whole or its parts.
But some how it works!
After
formulating a program of building requirements and getting agreement that the
words and diagrams are approved by the client. If the architect built-work can
meet this program and come to be the building the client intended is such an
example of the work of architecture as a metaphor and metaphorical work. (They
carry-over, bridge, and are each others advocate).
Limited
to meeting the program and the fulfilling the design contract says nothing about
the unintended consequences of the building on the context and the way the
metaphor outcome impacts for users, community and the general public. In some
ways this is the job of municipal Departments of Community Services, town
fathers, zoning boards and building departments and their building codes. All
contribute to honing the metaphors and their outcomes which is this
relationship of intended words to spoken words and the chasm between the two.
We are told to think before we
speak, picture what you are going to say then speak, still whatever we speak,
in tone, emphasis, timing(meter) and pitch can carry its own meanings; this was
also one of the final fields of investigation for my late mentor, Dr. Paul
Weiss.
Searle’s “task in
constructing a theory of metaphor is to try to state the principles which
relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical utterance meaning” 10.. In
like manner the architect tries to find a way that program relates to design
and design the final product.
A good example of unappreciated
excellent metaphors is the cases of the many non-New Yorkers who visit the city
and find no interest in the buildings. Whereas its’ natives have the language,
vocabulary and years of incremental experience to know both the words and the
metaphors of each and the collective of building –types. Searle adds:”
The basic principle of an
expression with its literal meaning and corresponding truth conditions can, in
various ways that are specific to the metaphor, call to mind anther meaning and
corresponding set of truths” In other words:” how does
one thing remind us of another”. 10.
Without apparent rhyme of
reason metaphors of all arts have a way of recalling other metaphors of other
times and places. In my mind I recall Brooklyn brick warehouses on Atlantic
Ave. with turn of the century Ford trucks and men adorned in vests, white
shirts and bow ties loading packages from those loading docks under large green
metal canopies. The streets are cobble stones. I can cross to this image when
seeing most old brick buildings in Leipzig, San Francisco, or Boston. No matter
the claims of mansion, palace, castle I will never mistake any such titled
commercial building with the likes of Versailles, Fontainebleau, etc. yet
seeing any view of formal gardens, great castles my mind’s eye will return me
to Schloss Schönbrunn outside
of Vienna (the palatial home of Maria Theresa and the Hapsburg Empire).
In the
case of building metaphors it is the familiarity with not only the building-
type, materials, context and convention but the architects, contactor’s
and owner’s personas which increase the understanding of the metaphor. In the
case of Dubai and other such contexts it is the lack of such familiarity and
tolerance for the strange that makes the metaphor acceptable on face value. The
metaphor is accepted yet not understood. As many beautiful things they are
awesome, forbidding, and indicative of some greater condition as being a
stranger in one’s own context. Buildings are perceived as cars manufactured by
some idioms indicative of their species with little conscious relevance to the
user’s context. It is very strange. Building designed for people who before
this generation found tents to be their habitat metaphor.
In the Metaphor and Thought’s
section on “Metaphor and Representation”:
Process and products in making
sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 11
It
explains the standard and traditional building types found in various contexts
as the chalet in the Alps and the specific style of each found in each of the
Alp’s counties and villages, etc. Psychological processes in metaphor
comprehension and memory by Alan Paivio and Mary Walsh say that Susanne Langer
writes that:” Metaphor is our most striking evidence of abstract seeing, of the
power the human mind to use presentational symbols”. 11
Interpretation of novel
metaphors by Bruce Fraser12 is trying to define metaphor he says that:
“A metaphor involves a nonliteral use of
language” 12. A non-literal use of language means that what is said is for
affect and not for specificity. A habitable metaphor is not meant for the user
to fully, continuously and forever recall all that went into its production. At
each moment in its use the metaphor may mean different things, least of which
may be any intended by its authors.
The
fact that the roof silhouette was to emulate a Belvedere in Florence, windows from
a palace in Sienna, and stucco from Tyrol is lost over time. Even, the design
principles so astutely applied by the likes of Paul Rudolf, Richard Meier, or
Marcel Breuer may be unnoticed in favor of other internal focuses. These many
design considerations may be the metaphor that gave the project its gestalt
that enabled the preparation of the documents that in turn were faithful
interpreted by skilled contractors and craftsman. Yet at each turn it is the
affect of metaphor and not necessarily its specifics that make a good design
not a great work of architecture or a working metaphor.
On
visiting the Marseille Block I was
struck by a plethora of innovation, and lack of care and relative poor quality
thane I was about standing in a Corbu building. Yet in Gaudi’s Barcelona
apartment block the affect of the sculpture was ever-present. I could not even
remember what particular theory or design principle governed, it was just a
Gaudiesque experience. It is this observation that allows us to make parallel
references to painting, music, dance, painting, sculpture and architecture as
metaphor since they are involves a nonliteral use of language. Except the
specifications, titles and performance descriptions a work of architecture
metaphor is open to interpretation and random perceptions in time and space.
What the maker might have intended and its perception may not be exact but can
be understood in a very general use of the common functions necessary as
finding the entrance, elevators, stairs, exits, toilets, etc.
At some
point Alvar Aalto chided members of his design team wanting to distort a part
of his final design to which he replied something like I would prefer you do
so that it would be less precious and still valid after intervention12.
Aalto
did not rely on modernism's fondness for industrialized processes as a
compositional technique, but forged an architecture influenced by a broad
spectrum of concerns. Alvar Aalto’s early work was influenced by contemporary
Nordic practitioners such as Asplund and Ragnar Ostberg, as well as by the
simple massing and ornamentation of the architettura mirwre of northern Italy.
His work evolved from the austere quality of the Railway Workers Housing
(1923), to the more Palladian inspired Workers Club (1924-1925) (both in
Jyvaskyla), and from there to the deftly refined and detailed Seinajoki Civil
Guards Complex (1925), Jyvaskyla Civil Guards Building (1927), and the Muurame
Church (1927-1929).
Composed
of simple, well proportioned volumes rendered in stucco or wood, these works
are characterized by their sparse decoration and selective use of classical
elements. Whether you know any of these things when you in one of Aalto’s work
you are in awe of its space and simplicity. The same may be said of the work of
Louis Isadore Kahn.
Images and models, similes and
metaphors by George A. Miller13
Defends a metaphor as an
abbreviated simile to appreciate similarities and analogies which is called
“appreciation”.
In psychology “appreciation”
(Herbert (1898)) was a general term for those mental process whereby an
attached experience is brought into relation with an already acquired and
familiar conceptual system. (Encoding, mapping, categorizing, inference,
assimilation and accommodation, attribution, etc). 13
Miller 13explains how
reading metaphors build an image in the mind. That is to say we “appreciate”
what we already know. I have always contended that we do not learn anything we
already do not know. We learn in terms of already established knowledge and
concepts. We converse reiterating what we presume the other knows, otherwise
the other party would not understand. The other party understands only because
he already knows.
The architect who assembles
thousands of bits of information , resifts and converts form words
to graphics and specification documents communicates the new proposed (the
strange new thing) in terms of the known and familiar. The first recipients are
the owner, building officials; contractors must read seeking confirmations of
known and confirm its adherence to expectations. After its construction the
users read familiar signs, apparatus, spaces, volumes, shapes and forms. The
bridge carries over from one to another what is already known .Even the strange
that becomes familiar are both known but not in the current relationship. For
example when we apply a technology used on ships to a building or a room which
is commonly associated with tombs as a bank, etc. Both are generally known but
not in that specific context. We could not appreciate it if it were not known
.It is what Weiss calls commonalities and is the selection between commonalities
and differences that makes a metaphor. About understanding and discerning
between what is” true in fact” and “true in the model” Miller says: Metaphors
are, on a literal interpretation, incongruous, if not actually false-a robust
sense of what is germane to the context and what is “true in fact” is necessary
for the recognition of a metaphor, and hence general knowledge must be
available to the reader (user, public).
“We try
to make the world that the author is asking us to imagine resemble the real
world (as we know it) in as many respects as possible. Offices, bedrooms,
lobbies, toilets, kitchens are such models which are built to specific
situations in images of yet some other context.
Kitchen is a social gathering
place, toilet is the baths of Rome, and the deck is top of a ship. The
architect accommodates all the realities of the goal of the room into the model
of the foreign context. By analogy what Miller 13distinguishes between
what the architect designed and what he thought are different. The architects
of the Renaissance tried to resurrect the grandeur of the classic building they
discovered and resurrected. The contemporary architect faces a vernacular of
design principles which are reified in to conventional building types. The
convention is the model whiles the specific application in the strange. Often
new buildings are likened to the first model or the prototype. The reader
knows the building type and is able to recognize the new version. About the
metaphor
Miller
sites Webster’s International Dictionary (2nd edition): “a
metaphor may be regard as a compressed simile, the comparison implied in the
former being explicit in the latter. In the making the comparison explicit is
the work of the designer and reader”. 13
“In
principle, three steps, recognition, reconstruction, and interpretation, must
be taken in understating metaphors, although the simplest instance the
processing may occur so rapidly that all three blend into a single mental act.”
When we face a new metaphor (building) a new context with its own vocabulary is
presented, one which the creator must find and connect and the other which the
reader must read and transfer from previous experience. 13
How
metaphors work by Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar 14.
distinguishes between (italics are Gluksberg and Keysar) “metaphor
topic” and “metaphor vehicle (predicate)” “The vehicle being a prototypical
exemplar (cigarettes) of that attributive category (time bomb). 14.
Prototype theory is a mode of
graded categorization in cognitive science, where some
members of a category are more central than others14.. For example, when
asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more
frequently cited than, say, stool.” I asked a New Yorker to give an
example of an office building and they answered the Empire State Building it
would be because of its height, and reputation, In fact the office building and
not the “church “building shape has come to be a metaphor of the city. New York
is an office building city. I can see only a flash glimpse and I will know it
is Manhattan.
“Metaphors are generally used to describe
something new by references to something familiar (Black, 1962b), not just in
conversation, but in such diverse areas as science and psychotherapy. Metaphors
are not just nice, they are necessary. 14.
They
are necessary for casting abstract concepts in terms of the apprehendable, as
we do, for example, when we metaphorically extend spatial concepts and spatial
terms to the realms of temporal concepts and temporal terms. 14.
In another sense when an architect
creates a metaphor it a building which takes on the attributes of all buildings
and if it is work of art, as a building metaphor it takes on the attributes of
the calls of buildings which are more than a tin box but a statement of complex
ideas which demands reading and is an opportunity to be read.
How do I know it is an “office
building”?
1. It is located in the
neighborhood of other office buildings
2. It does not have balconies
and, curtains in the windows,
3. It has an open and wide public
plaza and unrestricted wide openings
4. Its glazing, cladding and
skin are high tech, impersonal and large scale.
In adaptive use buildings where
office are housed in residential and residential are house in office buildings
precisely the metaphor topic and the metaphor vehicle are purposefully confuses
the metaphor its unique identity.
In the Metaphor
and Science section of the book: The shift from metaphor to analogy in
Western science by Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski 15.
Part on “The alchemists they
describe a system of triangulation I developed, taught and applied at Pratt
Institute which is as: “Metals were often held to consist of two components:
mercury, which was fiery, active and male, and sulphur, which was watery,
passive and female. Thus the combination of the two metals could be viewed as a
marriage.
Metals
and other minerals were often compared with heavenly bodies and their
properties triangulated to produce a third. Not to let this arbitrary
characterizations blemish the structure of this system it is valid to
triangulate and in fact15. much of architectural making of metaphors is a
matter of mapping, diagramming and combining to conclude the validity of
combining and matching unlike materials, shapes, & systems. In this way any
one of the metaphors and the whole system of bridging and carrying over is
metaphoric. Map a rectangle and circle to a third and you get a part square
part circular odd shape. Map cold and hot and you get warm; map hotel, office,
residential and shops and you get mixed use.
Renaissance European cities
beguile their metaphor with such combinations known by their scale, cladding,
décor, and entrees. Particularly charming are the German “guest houses
("gast hofs"), English family pubs, etc. New Towns and contemporary
town centers are mixed use, multi zoned urban cores. It isn’t the referent
where one is the other but where there is a similarity between like features of
two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart
and a pump. The commonality is apparent. They both share a similar
characteristic. The hotel, residence , office and shop are joined by
their convenience to that provide service to clients and their use of
rooms, and a core of service, mountainous and housekeeping and supply. A small
staff can support these businesses and their
customers are compatible.
They all have a front of the house and back-of-the -house
function (garbage, deliveries, maintenance, etc) in many cities lacks zoning
regulations have alo9owed such mixed uses zones to still exist today. Seeing these metaphors is a part of the fabric
and character of neighborhoods.
Metaphor is reasoning using
abstract characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight forward extension
of its use in commonplace reasoning15..
All this to say and as if there
was a choice that architects have a choice where to make a new building
by analogy or by metaphor. Analogies may be the ticky-tacks, office
building, church, school building, fire station analogies to a first model
verses an abstraction of a program into a new prototype. Is the analogy any
less a work of architecture?
Or do we only mean that works
of architecture are works of art when they make abstractions?
“In processing analogy, people implicitly
focus on certain kinds of commonalities and ignore others” 15..
In my
New Haven drafting service, builders would give me a floor plan for me to
redraft to build a new house: they simply wanted an analogy to the first with
no changes. The Florida School Board uses and reuses both firms and plans to
design new high schools based on plans used before to build other schools with
only slight modifications to make them site-specific. This is design by
analogy. Many design professionals use standard details and standard specifications
relying upon analogy to design a new building. The overall may be either
metaphor or analogous. Whole professional practices are formulated and bases on
one or the other practices. Noting these things an industry was created called
the “housing industry’ churning out analogies rather than individual metaphors,
leaving the metaphor to the context or theme of the development. It is famous
architects who are mostly famous because they made metaphors and from them
analogies were drawn. The analogous phenomenon has resulted in the nineteenth
century Sears offering pre-designed and package barns ready to ship form
Wisconsin to any where by mail order. Pre-engineered metal being and
manufactured homes are all part of the analogous scheme of reasoning the built
environment. Users have access to either and are able to shift perceptions. In
commonplace users wanting to be fed by metaphorical architecture go to Disney,
European, or urban entertainment and recreation centers. Las Vegas thrives on
what I call "metaphoric analogies” abstractions of analogous building
types. It is that synapse which attracts and beguiles the visitor hungry for
authenticity and reality. Living in analogous urban replicas city dweller
migrated to the suburbs in search of the metaphor of “a man’s home is his
castle”. Today this metaphor has become an analogy as the metaphor proliferates
and analogies from one to another state and country.
We may be told a “cell is
like a factory” which gives us a framework for analogy and similarity.
An analogy is a kind of highly
selective similarity where we focus on certain commonalities and ignore others.
The commonality is no that they are both built out of bricks but that they both
take in resources to operate and to generate their products. 15.
As users, design professionals
begin their design process by finding analogies from extent projects as user
faced with the building resort to their own vocabulary. Both do not favor one
or the other and vacillate between the two for what they can learn.
For example HOK Sport Venue
Event Company prides itself on designing stadiums recapturing the community
context, history of the teams while designing a new abstraction worthy of the
future of the game and the entertainment of the fans.
“Populous”
(HOK sports facility business) is a global design practice specializing in
creating environments that draw people and communities together for
unforgettable experiences. So much so that the new name of the firm is:
“POPULACE”. “As Populous, we enthusiastically embrace the expertise we uniquely
claim—drawing people together around teams, athletes, events, places, commerce,
industry and ideas they wholeheartedly embrace and adore.”
On the creative and architect’s
side: “The central idea is that an analogy is a mapping of knowledge from
one domain (the base) into another (the target) such that a system of relations
that holds among the base objects also holds among the target objects”. On
the user’s side in interpreting an analogy, people seek to put objects of
the base in one-to-one correspondence with the objects of the targets as to
obtain the maximum structural match” 15.. Confronting a Bedouin
village of tents a westerner faced with apparent differences looks for
similarities.
“The corresponding objects in the base and
target need not resemble each other; rather object correspondences are
determined by the like roles in the matching relational structures.” 15. Cushions for seats, carpets for flooring,
stretched fabric for walls and roof. Cable for beams and columns, etc.
“Thus, an analogy is a way of aligning and
focusing on rational commonalities independently of the objects in which those
relationships are embedded.” 15. However, there may be metaphors at work as
well as the user reads the tent’s tension cable structure, banners and the
entire assemblage in a “romantic” eclectic image of Arabness, metaphors beyond
the imperial but of the realm of the abstract and inaccurate.
“Central to the mapping process is the
principle of “systematicity: people prefer to map systems of predicates
favored by higher-order relations with inferential import (the Arab tent),
rather than to
map isolated predicates. 15. The
systematicity principle reflects a tacit preference for coherence and
inferential power in interpreting analogy”. Arab tentness and
“home-sweet-home” map basics from the “home-sweet-home” to the Arabness to make
all the bits and pieces be understood.
Thus
architects choose building elements from catalogs and in the most metaphoric
circumstances designs elements from scratch. Metaphor buildings may or may not
be composed of metaphoric elements.
Metaphors
and buildings which are analogies may of or may not have elements
designed metaphorically. However, it is less likely that an analogues design
will contain metaphorical elements.
“No extraneous associations: Only
commonalities strengthen an analogy. Further relations and associations between
the base and target- for example, thematic consecutions- do not contribute to
the analogy”. 15. Analogous matching
looks for duplicates, replicas and like elements; the more the better. Most
contemporary commercial design relies on many commonalities hence CAD, design
format programs, etc assume commonalities in and analogies. After choosing
title system the rest follows as repetition as before. Many commercial house
plans, office plans, department store, etc acre designed as analogous design
schemes.
As the architect of record for
Dhahran Academy in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and after having designed and
redesigned their primary buildings the school superintendent asked how to go
about adding additional space. Rather than adding to his expense and time for
another design process I recommended and they engage a pre-engineered steel
building manufacturer to produce this building for them. In this case I knew
the analogous rather than the metaphorical process would be appropriate. King
Faisal University asked my advice to design their new and temporary school to
house their school of architecture while the permanent overall campus plans
were being completed. Again I suggested the analogous approach of a
pre-engineered building system. Of course within this approach, the specific
sizes, electrical, plumbing and HVAC requirements were all specifically
selected from already available “off-the-shelf” modules.
Architects
design by translating concepts into two dimensional graphics that which
ultimately imply a multidimensional future reality. She tests the horizontal
and vertical space finding accommodation and commonality of adjacency,
connectivity and inclusiveness.
To Boyd, metaphors simply
impart their commonplace not necessity to their similarity or analogous16.. This
kind of metaphor simply adds information to the hearer which was not otherwise
available which explains the built metaphor that is neither analogous not
abstractly common but works, is unique and serves a purpose.
I found
methane gas silos on the Ruhergebeit in Germany’s three city district conically
shaped (with the wider circumference at the base) like a Byzantine apse with
channeled walks and fluted sides. I had seen nothing like this and it took
hours and an article I wrote which was published in Progressive Architecture to
explain this metaphor. I called it Pollution Architecture. The Pricklley
Mountain project in Warren Vermont was another such example of received
“commonplaces” of its use(s).
Metaphor
in science by Thomas S. Kuhn 17. speaking about
scientific language he distinguishes between “dubbing”
(invest with any name, character, dignity, or title; style; name;
call) and “epistemic access” (relating to, or involving knowledge;
cognitive.).”When dubbing is abandoned the link between language and the
world disappears”. 17.
Architectural metaphors are all
about names, titles, and the access to that the work provides for the reader to
learn and develop. At its best the vocabulary of the parts and whole of the
work is an encyclopedia and cultural building block. The work incorporates the
current state of man’s culture and society which is an open book for the
reader.
The freedom of both the creator
and reader to dub and show is all part of the learning experience of the
metaphor. As a good writer “shows” and not “tells” so a good designer
manifests configurations without words.
However objective, thorough and
scientific; the designer, the design tools and the work gets dubbed with
ideas (not techne) we may call style, personality, and identity above and
beyond the program and its basic design (techne). It is additional controls,
characterizations and guidelines engrafted into the form not necessarily
overtly and expressly required. Dubbing may occur in the making of
metaphors as a way in which the design itself is conceived and brought
together. Dubbing may in fact be the process which created the work as
an intuitive act.
Metaphorical imprecision and
the “top down” research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn18
About Cognition (pertaining to
the mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as
contrasted with emotional and volitional processes) justifies Socrates
“learning as recollecting” to explain that we absorb new knowledge on the
shoulders of old experiences.
Pylyshyn explains: “…………….consider
new concepts as being characterized in terms of old ones (plus logical
conjunctives)” 18 As William J.
Gordon points out we make the strange familiar by talking about one thing in
terms of another. Pylyshyn: "On the other hand, if it were possible to
observe and to acquire new “knowledge” without the benefit of these concepts
(conceptual schemata (an underlying organizational pattern or structure;
conceptual framework) which are the medium of thought), then such “Knowledge” would not itself be conceptual or
be expressed in the medium of thought, and therefore it would not be
cognitively structured, integrated with other knowledge, or even comprehended.
Hence, it would be intellectually inaccessible”. 18
In
other words we would not know that we know. Where knowing is the Greek for
suffer, or experience. This was the Greek ideal proved in Oedipus; “through
suffering man learns”; we know that we know. Therefore, when we observe that architecture
makes metaphors we mean that we know that we know that works exists and we
can read authors messages. We learn the work.
The art
implicitly has gathered the information and organized it in way that given the
right apriori vocabulary, codes definitions and signal and sign
cognitions one can read the message in one way or another depending on the
individual and the variety of individual perceptions. Buildings, artifacts,
products with embedded (encrypted) workings can be read, learned, assimilated,
connected and either by epiphany or Pavolivain stimulus –response known.
Climbing the stairs of a pyramid in Mexico City or a fire stair in a high rise
is essentially the same except for the impact of its context and what the stair
connects (create and base) and the object on which the stair ascends and
descends. The conditions, ideals and goals are very different while most of the
operation is the same. In this way you can say that non-architecture can be
identifies as teaching nothing.
I don’t
believe that there is such a thing, even the “tin-box” (pre-engineered
manufactured factory warehouse is a metaphor. It may be a one page comic book
character but is has content and is readable.
Pulling from three dimensional
and two dimensional means and methods, from asymmetrical and symmetrical,
and from spatial and volumetric design principles the architect assembles
metaphor metaphorically by associating and carrying-over these principles
applying to the program at hand to lift and stretch the ideas into space and
across the range of disassociated ideas and concepts making a new and very
strange metaphor unlike anything ever created yet filled with thousands of
familiar signs and elements that make it work . 18
Just as practice makes perfect
for the concert pianist, opera singer, ballerina, etc so is it for the
architect. However, having said this reader is at imitate disadvantage except
for the natives of a particular location. Little old ladies in the tiniest
Italian village can tell in the minutest detail all about every building,
street and area. She has learned and passed on the “knowledge” from her
ancestors and is as trained as its creators but in a totally different way.
Hers is the act of perception and reader who must recreate and challenge her
memory and recollections. She does not have to work at design but at reliving
and imagining the design process to find the details and the whole of the
building and its social, political and chronological context. Her explanations
will include great joy, violent emotions, dis-tastes and rejections of the
owners and authors. Her experience of the metaphor will be different from that
of the creators both about the same work.
About the difference between
words (which are limited and specific to concepts Pylyshyn18
notes: “…in the case of words there is a component of reason and choice which
mediates between cognitive content and outward expression. I can choose what
words I use, whereas I cannot in the same sense choose in terms of which I represent
the world.” So architects and readers deal with materials, structures, systems
and leave the concepts to a variety of possible outcomes. 18
About a “top-down strategy”
called “structured programming” in computer science allows for a point of entry
into a the development of a new idea where you begin with an idea and after
testing and developing that idea bringing everyday knowledge to bear on the
development of theoretical ideas with some confidences that they are new either
incoherent nor contradictory, and furthermore with some way of exploring what
they entail. 18
The
point is there are better and worse places for introducing rigor into an
evolving discipline. “This explanation is pretty much that path of the
development of my theory that "architecture is the making of
metaphors" has followed over the past 45 years. From general recognitions,
observations and analogies within the framework of professional design practice
, painting, sculpture and philosophy to discussions with renowned scholars most
notably Dr. Paul Weiss , followed by a lecture series involving prominent
design professionals and arts and then years of research and documentation into
monographs.,
Explaining this approach as a
“skyhook-skyscraper" construction of science from the roof down to the yet
un-constructed foundations” describes going from the general to the specific in
and decreasing general to an increasing amount of detail and pragmatic
evidence, referents, claims and resolutions. 18
Structural
engineers design from the top down so as to accumulate the additive loads to
the consecutive lower members and ultimately the foundation which bears it all.
Conceptual design and first impressions both begin with the general and go to
the specific. Gated communities, Newtown’s, malls, resorts and commercial
buildings give high marks to the overall and superficial .Yet most working
metaphors are the result of design and perception from the gestalt (overall
concept) to the emptiness (non-gestalt) . Maria Theresa’s
Schoenbrunn is an excellent example along with major university campuses such as
Cambridge, Yale, Oxford, etc where theme and design philosophy prevails and
dominates from the facades to the planning techniques of large public spaces to
increasing private and smaller spaces and detailing, where with the overall one
cannot imagine any thing.
The
gestalt is the entity in which all occurs and with the concept there is no
context. So it is with metaphor with it the rest of the conversation has no
framework and no conception can begin either in its creation or use.
Pylyshyn asks:” What
distinguishes a metaphor from its complete explication (explain) ….”? In the
case of architecture the entire set of contract documents, program, etc.”
Pylyshyn answers: “The difference between literal and metaphorical
description lies primarily in such pragmatic consideration as (1) the
stability, referential specificity, and general acceptance of terms: and (2)
the perception, shared by those who use the terms, that the resulting
description characterizes the world as it really is, rather than being a
convenient way of talking about it, or a way of capturing superficial
resemblances”. 18
In this
ways of all the arts, architecture is the most profound in that it
combines and confirms the secular (of this time), “how things really are” with
the gestalt of personal, social, community and private importance. If art is
the making of metaphors and it has no real use then how significant is
architecture with both “reality” and fantasy/ imagination combined and
confirmed by its very existence.
I mean
to say that the very real existence of work of art which bespeaks of life and
times exists and is accessible and in our contexts is itself a metaphor of
great significance and satisfaction. Were the building us it would be me,
where I a building I be it. The metaphor expresses a value common to both; both
are both real and ideas at the same time. The metaphor is the bridge and
confirmation of art in the world, life in the flesh and flesh become ideas.
Architecture is an extreme reification from notion in both creator and reader
of materials and idea.
Pylyshyn asserts that:
“metaphor induces a (partial) equivalence between two known phenomenons; a
literal account describes the phenomenon in authentic terms in which it is
seen”. 18
Socially
speaking worldly people that work in offices dress then behave the way they do
if for example they reported to work in manufacturing warehouses? Their
scenario of the behavior and the metaphor would not correspond.
Metaphor and Education is the
final section:
Readers may wish to review my
monograms on Schools and Metaphors (Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education
Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York and The Metametaphor of architectural education", (North Cypress, Turkish University.
December, 1997)
The instructive metaphor:
Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer19. concludes that: “analogical transfer theory ( “instructive
metaphors create an analogy between a to-be-learned- system(target domain) and
a familiar system(metaphoric domain)” 19. It was these concerns behind Frank Lloyd
Wright’s separation from the architecture of Louis Sullivan and what spurned
the collective work of the Bauhaus in Germany , that is to express the truth
about the building’s systems, materials, open life styles, use of light
and air and bringing nature into the buildings environment, not to mention
ridding building of the irrelevant and time worn cliches of building design
decoration, and traditional principles of classical architecture as professed
by the Beaux-Arts movement. For
equipoise “Unity, symmetry and balance” were replaced by “asymmetrical
tensional relationships” between, “dominant, subdominant and tertiary” forms
and the results of science and engineering influence on architectural design, a
new design metaphor was born. The Bauhaus found the metaphor in all the arts,
the commonalties in making jewelry, furniture, architecture, interior design,
decoration, lighting, industrial design, etc.
Metaphor and learning by Hugh G
Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag20.
Concludes that metaphorical
teaching strategies often lead to better and more memorable learning than do
explicit strategies which explains why urbanites have a “street smarts” that is
missing from sub-urban; they actually learn from the metaphors that make up the
context. Of course this is in addition to the social aspects of urbanity which
is again influenced by the opportunities of urban metaphors: parks, play
grounds, main streets, broadways, avenues, streets, sidewalks, plazas,
downtown, markets, street vendors, etc.
About metaphor:
“Radically new knowledge results from a
change in modes of representation of knowledge, whereas a comparative metaphor occurs
within the existing representations which serve to render the comparison
sensible. The comparative level of metaphor might allow for extensions of
already existing knowledge, but would not provide a new form of understanding.
20.
When visiting new cities in
another country one is immediately confronted with metaphors which create
similarities as interactive and comparative as we seek to find similarities and
differences with what we already known in our home context.
Visiting,
sketching and writing about over seventy European cities I noted the character
and ambience of each and the differences between one and another. I drew so
many vignettes of buildings and cityscapes noting the metaphor of each. I had a
Baedeker’s guide to educate me about the time
and place of each street and building. I had already studied the history of
architecture so I could relate the metaphors to their own time and
circumstance, yet I enjoyed each metaphor in my time as places and settings for
contemporary urban life with a backdrop of their historical past, Each metaphor
was of the past’s impact on the future with the unique design of crafts,
building materials, and skills that were peculiar to their times but were no
enjoyed in the present. In this context there are the natives who experience
these metaphors all their lives and the visitor who is fist learning the lesson
of these metaphors. Both experience these in different ways. The native knows
the place and comprehends both the old and the new knowledge domains whereas the
visitor the very same metaphor may be interactive, creating the similarity
under construction.
The visitor (this is my word)
may “well be acquiring one of the constitutive or residual metaphors of the
place (this is my word) at the same time; same metaphor, different
experiences.
Educational uses of metaphor by
Thomas G. Sticht21 discusses how the natures of
metaphor as a speech act and
serves as a linguistic tool for overcoming cognitive limitations.
Sticht claims that metaphors
have a way of extending our capacities for communications. As most artists
their language is beyond speech and to the peculiar craft of their art of which
their practice and exercise develops new capacity and opportunity to teach and
express thought outside of the linguistics but is nevertheless perhaps as
valuable and worthy21.
Sticht adds: “that speech is
a fleeting, temporarily linear means of communicating, coupled with the fact
that that, as human beings, we are limited in how much information we can
maintain and process at any one time in active memory, means that as speakers
we can always benefit from tools for efficiently bringing information into
active memory, encoding it for communication, and recording it, as listeners,
in some memorable fashion.” 21
Relevantly
he points out that metaphor is the solution insofar as it encodes and captures
the information:” transferring chunks of experience from well –known to less
well known contexts. The vividness
thesis, which maintains that metaphors permit and impress a more memorable
learning due to the greater imagery or concreteness or vividness of the
“full-blooded experience” conjured up by the metaphorical vehicle; and the inexpressibility thesis, in which
it is noted that certain aspects of natural experience are never encoded in
language and that metaphors carry with them the extra meanings never encoded in
language21. One picture is worth a thousand words and how valuable are the
arts as makers of who we are as a people, society and time.
“The mnemonic (intended to assist the
memory) function of metaphor as expressed by Ortony’s vividness
thesis also points to the value of metaphor as a tool for producing durable
learning from unenduiring speech”. 21
Architects both compose the
program and reify its contents from words to diagrams and diagrams to two
dimensional graphics and three dimensional models to reify and bring- out
(educate) the user’s mind and fulfillment of unspoken and hidden needs. Needs
which may or may not have been programmed and intended; the metaphor is the
final resolution until it is built and used. Then it is subject to further
tests of time, audience, markets, trends, fashions, social politics,
demographic shifts, economics, and cultural changes.
Footnotes:
Note: Footnotes
are intended to be superscripted throughout text.
1. Metaphor and Thought: Second
Edition
Edited by Andrew Ortony: School
of Education and social Sciences and
Institute for the learning
Sciences: North Western University
Published by Cambridge
University Press
First pub: 1979
Second pub: 1993
2. Generative metaphor: A
perspective on problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon
3. The conduit metaphor: A case
of frame conflict in our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy.
4. In Programs and
Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad'
5. The contemporary theory of
metaphor by George Lakoff
6. "Surrogates," published by Indiana
University Press. By Paul Weiss
7. Metaphor, induction, and
social policy: The convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert
J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro
8. Figurative speech and
linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock
9. Some problems with the
emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart
10. Metaphor by John R. Searle
Section on “Metaphor and
Representation”:
11. Process and products in
making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
12. Interpretation of novel
metaphors by Bruce Fraser
13. Images and models, similes
and metaphors by George A. Miller
14. How metaphors work by Sam
Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar
15. In the Metaphor and
Science section of the book: The shift from metaphor to analogy in
Western science by Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski
16. Metaphor and theory change:
What is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd
17. Metaphor in science by
Thomas S. Kuhn
18. Metaphorical imprecision
and the “top down” research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn
Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of
Governors Professor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive
Science. He is the author of Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think
(2003) and Computation and Cognition: toward a Foundation for Cognitive
Science (1984), both published by The MIT Press, as well as over a hundred
scientific papers on perception, attention, and the computational theory of
mind.
Metaphor and Education is the
final section:
Readers may wish to review my
monograms on Schools and Metaphors (Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education
Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York and The Metametaphor of architectural education", (North Cypress, Turkish University.
December, 1997)
19. The instructive metaphor:
Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer
20. Metaphor and learning by
Hugh G Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag
21. Educational uses of
metaphor by Thomas G. Sticht
22. Wikopedia on the www.
23. “Argumentation: The Study
of Effective Reasoning, 2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky of
Northwestern University and published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of
Chantilly, Virginia
24. WWW
25. From Wikopedia on the www.
26. “Difference and
Identity” : 4.0 Gilles Deleuze (French pronunciation: [ʒil dəløz]), (18 January
1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century.
Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early works (i.e., those prior to
his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly summarized as a systematic
inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference
is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different
from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities.
To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference.
Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, does
Deleuze argue, "given that there are differences of nature between things
of the same genus." That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the
categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from
differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless
series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and
x'", and "x" = "the difference between...” and so forth. Difference
goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must
grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories,
resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference
in itself. "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it
is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to
what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words,
in its internal difference."
In analyzing a metaphor we
ask: “What are its commonalities and significant differences and
what are the characteristics common to both”.
27. 6.0 Webster’s standard
dictionary
28. Identifying Metaphor in
Language: a cognitive approach Style,
fall, 2002
by Gerard J. Steen
29. The Contemporary Theory of
Metaphor: a perspective
Researched
Publications: Refereed and Peer-reviewed Journals: "monographs":
Barie
Fez-Barringten; Associate professor Global University
1.
"Architecture the making of metaphors"
Main
Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education; Sep.-Oct. 1971,
Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York.
2."Schools
and metaphors"
Main
Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971,
Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York.
3."User's
metametaphoric phenomena of architecture and Music":
“METU” (Middle East Technical University: Ankara, Turkey): May
1995"
Journal
of the Faculty of Architecture
4."Metametaphors
and Mondrian:
Neo-plasticism and its' influences in architecture"
1993 Available on Academia.edu since 2008
5.
"The Metametaphor of architectural education",
North Cypress, Turkish University. December, 1997
6."Mosques and metaphors" Unpublished,1993
7."The basis of the metaphor of Arabia" Unpublished, 1994
8."The conditions of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 1994
9.
"The metametaphor theorem"
Architectural
Scientific Journal, Vol. No. 8; 1994 Beirut Arab University.
10. "Arabia’s metaphoric images" Unpublished, 1995
11."The context of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 1995
12.
"A partial metaphoric vocabulary of Arabia"
“Architecture: University of Technology in Datutop; February 1995
Finland
13."The
Aesthetics of the Arab architectural metaphor"
“International Journal for Housing Science and its applications” Coral
Gables, Florida.1993
14."Multi-dimensional
metaphoric thinking"
Open House, September 1997: Vol. 22; No. 3, United Kingdom: Newcastle
uponTyne
15."Teaching
the techniques of making architectural metaphors in the twenty-first century.” Journal of King Abdul Aziz University Engg...Sciences; Jeddah: Code: BAR/223/0615:OCT.2.1421 H. 12TH EDITION; VOL. I and “Transactions” of
Cardiff University, UK.
April 2010
16. “Word
Gram #9” Permafrost: Vol.31
Summer 2009 University of Alaska Fairbanks; ISSN: 0740-7890; page 197
17. "Metaphors and Architecture."
ArchNet.org. October, 2009.at MIT
18. “Metaphor as an inference from sign”;
University of Syracuse
Journal of Enterprise Architecture;
November 2009: and nominated architect of the year in special
issue of Journal of Enterprise Architecture explaining the unique
relationship between enterprise and classic building architecture.
19.
“Framing the art vs. architecture
argument”; Brunel University (West London); BST: Vol. 9 no. 1: Body, Space & Technology Journal: Perspectives
Section
20.
“Urban Passion”: October 2010; Reconstruction
& “Creation”; June 2010; by C. Fez-Barringten; http://reconstruction.eserver.org/;
21.
“An architectural history of metaphors”:
AI & Society: (Journal of human-centered and machine intelligence) Journal
of Knowledge, Culture and Communication: Pub: Springer; London; AI &
Society located in University of Brighton, UK;
AI & Society. ISSN (Print)
1435-5655 - ISSN (Online) 0951-5666 : Published
by Springer-Verlag;; 6 May 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/j2632623064r5ljk/
Paper copy: AIS Vol. 26.1. Feb. 2011; Online ISSN 1435-5655; Print ISSN
0951-5666;
DOI 10.1007/s00146-010-0280-8; : Volume 26, Issue 1 (2011), Page
103.
22.
“Does Architecture Create Metaphors?; G.Malek;
Cambridge; August 8,2009
Pgs
3-12 (4/24/2010)
23.
“Imagery or Imagination”:the role of
metaphor in architecture:Ami Ran (based on Architecture:the making of
metaphors); :and Illustration:”A Metaphor of Passion”:Architecture oif Israel
82.AI;August2010pgs.83-87.
24.
“The soverign built metaphor”: monograph
converted to Power Point for presentation to Southwest Florida Chapter of the
American Institute of Architects. 2011
25.“Architecture:the making of metaphors”:The
Book;
Contract
to publish: 2011
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE6 2XX
United Kingdom
12 Back Chapman Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE6 2XX
United Kingdom
Edited by
Edward Richard Hart,
0/2 249 Bearsden Road
Glasgow
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UK
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