Metaphor issues of “architecture is art” stasis

Architecture is an art, because like art, it too, makes metaphors which are a stasis because “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 apparent commonality. It not only is apparent but with 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 for most that is only true by his skill in drawing, design and specifying and not his skill as a master carpenter.
The metaphor stasis is metaphor’s two technical and conceptual dimensions. Both are valid separately and even more acceptable in combination. But how do they two operate and how does knowing this benefit design, use and evaluation of built works?
Metaphor issues of “architecture is art” stasis (Complex Structure of Argument Stasis and issues)
Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com
bariefezbarringten.gmail.com
                  There are two parts to this proposal; one what is the problem and the second is what the solution is. I am generally against claiming anything in terms of problems since the term problem implies choice whereas most of my own work is in deviations and organic creation resulting not from problem solving but aggregating systems, materials and information. The Problem: The problem can be stated in the wider context of all man-created services and products and includes the aesthetic, social, cultural and psychological relations we have with our man-made environment. Manufacturers of such basics as steel, bricks and windows as well as master builders are less concerned with generic labels for themselves and their work, class or academic identifications. It is the referees of culture that face the commonalities and differences of our society to reckon our social mores and folklores. This reckoning is what produces the curriculums for schools, colleges, and universities as well as research, development and government licensing and regulating agencies. As architects are schooled, apprenticed, tested and licensed the field is faced each year with continuing education, new technologies and contemporary social ideals. The best of our culture produces authentic and original prototypes, leaving cloning and emulation to others. Issue grow out of controversy  
                 Because architecture is such a huge subject encompassing many different facets of our culture, science and technologies. Richard Meier says that architecture is the greatest of all the arts. Wikopedia offers this definition: A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment, from the macro level of how a building integrates with its surrounding context like town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture to the micro level of architectural or construction details and, sometimes, furniture and hardware. Wider still, architecture is the activity of designing any kind of system. Even though our culture considers architecture to be a visual experience, the other senses play a role in how we experience both natural and built environments. Attitudes towards the senses depend on culture. The design process and the sensory experience of a space are distinctly separate views, each with its own language and assumptions. Architectural works are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and, sometimes, as Work of art. Historical civilizations are often known primarily through their architectural achievements.
                 There are no lack of questions, investigations and reasoning about architecture likening it to building supervision to the master minding of the great pyramids and contemporary iconic supersaturates. Likening architecture to one of the other sciences, arts, philosophies, etc is trying to see it through one or the other prisms, perspectives to reconcile it into our cultural vocabulary. Depending on the architecture being viewed architecture many sometimes seem very scientific as science fiction, or artistic when viewing the architecture of Rome or the renaissance. The proposition that architecture is the making of metaphors is quest for a generic one size-fits-all theorem to stasis the question with the topoi of architecture for all times, building types and systems. It should even work when the term is not applied to making buildings or landscape but also computers, programs, communications systems and military strategy. The Answer: Architecture is an art, because like art, it too, makes metaphors which are a stasis because “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 apparent commonality. It not only is apparent but with 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 for most that is only true by his skill in drawing, design and specifying and not his skill as a master carpenter. The metaphor stasis is metaphor’s two technical and conceptual dimensions. Both are valid separately and even more acceptable in combination. But how do they two operate and how does knowing this benefit design, use and evaluation of built works? The technical is that all art, including architecture, expresses one thing in terms of another by its inherent and distinct craft. On the one hand there is the architect who acts as the master builder (head carpenter); and on the other the fountain of conceptual metaphors which expresses ideas as built conceptual metaphors other wise known as works of architecture.
               Techne is actually a system of practical knowledge as a craft or art informed by knowledge of forms. For example, the craft of managing a firm of architects where even virtue is a kind of technê of management and design practice, one that is based on an understanding of the profession, business and market. In this case the technai are such activities as drafting, specifying, managing, negotiating, programming, planning, supervising, and inspection. By association with these technai, we can include house-building, mathematics, plumbing, making money, writing, and painting. So much so that the study and practice of design is devoid from the humanities and downplays theories of architecture; developing rather the crafts, skill and understandings needed to engineer, plan, sketch, draw, delineate, specify, write, and design. Contemporary architecture is replete with axioms, principles and theorems guiding the geometry, applications of science, use of engineering, and formal logic to produce technical metaphors and justly excluding a whole conversation about the conceptual part of the built metaphor. Therefore out of both the resolution and the controversy consider the following issues: We derive issues for the controversy between art and architecture and the resolution that they both make metaphors which is both their commonality, stasis, topoi and Resolution to all claims. Depending on the medium, application and utility art manifests itself through the metaphor in varying degrees and levels. The referents, commonality not connectivity may not always be apparent as in so-called “abstract art” and ‘brutalism architecture”. These issues are the questions inherent in the controversy and vital to the resolution that architecture is the making of metaphors. Inherent because the declarative nether defines how art makes neither metaphors nor the apparently unrelated manifestations of architecture.
               On face value art and its casual referents do not compare to architecture and architecture does not always link to art. So the declaration is inherently controversial thus yielding the overflow of its internal commonalities and differences. These issues are vital to the inductive reasoning of the resolution. Most of these issues are parrallel but there are some that are convergent .
Issues: 1. Art and architecture both begin with a “top-down” approach later followed by designs which meet the parte. Alternatively, the parte may follow the design/creative process and be presented to defend the design. All arts including architecture have a parte which is a model and concept that may be developed after assimilating the program in the process of making a habitable conceptual metaphor, the very first step in the design process is to develop a “parte’. `
2. Both art and architecture share [1.1] generative metaphor which “carries –over” perspectives from one domain of experience to another where artist builds one thing in terms of another where the other is the model, and, what is built is the application, the model being the “ideal” of the proposed design. While architects may initially state an ideal, it most likely evolves and even radically changes by the time the design process yields an architectural configuration (building manifestation). Once achieved the “parte” (concept/gestalt) manifests and can be articulated.
3. [Axiom II. 1.2.1] Both art and architecture Peculiarize, personalize and authenticate for their metaphor to live. This the way the user metaphorize the using process, the user and the work empathize. 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.
4. Conversely, a dead metaphor is one which really does not contain any fresh metaphor insofar as it does not really “get thoughts across”; designs without concerns for scale, hierarchies, scenarios, surprise, delight, vistas, etc will be “dead”. They are “techne” driven, engineering a building without metaphoric concerns. Such a work is a techne driven design with craft-like knowledge. Art without a fresh metaphor can be decorative, colorful and interesting but will not be considered a work of art.
5. Both art and architecture involve techne (a system of practical knowledge). As a craft or art informed by knowledge of forms such as the craft of managing a firm of architects where even virtue is a kind of technê of management and design practice, one that is based on an understanding of the profession, business and market and technai are such activities as drafting, specifying, managing, negotiating, programming, planning, supervising, and inspection; by association with these technai, we can include house-building, mathematics, plumbing, making money, writing, and painting. So much so that the study and practice of design is devoid from the humanities and downplays theories of architecture developing rather the crafts, skill and understandings needed to engineer, plan, sketch, draw, delineate, specify, write, and design.
6. As art, architecture is a conduit of 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. Irregardless of the details the overall concept is “transferred “from one to the other, irrespective of sub-dominant and tertiary design elements.
7. In works of architecture there can be a 1.2.2/1.2.3 Conduit City-wide metaphor where the Geometry of urban blocks and the location of building masses reflect one anther into a scheme to sharply define the volume and mass of the city block and experience of city streets (Vincent Scully). In New York City the grid and this insistence on buildings reflecting the geometry of the grid is a metaphor of city-wide proportions. 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 mater where it’s location on the block; no matter when or in what sequence the metaphoric constraint of appropriateness or zoning formulas, all lead the ideas to flow from one to another architect. Furthermore, the reader is able to “appreciate” (to attach importance to a thing because of its worth) the street, its geometry, limits and linearity as an idea on the 1.2.2/1.2.3 conduit from the architect, through the metaphor and to the reader.
8. As art, [Axiom IV] architecture shapes the culture. As art building shapes and forms tend to reflect common geometry; building types tend to share common facilities; building code use designations influence the selection of applicable code requirements, architecture, forming clusters and community spaces create opportunities for neighborhood identity and nurturing cultural identity. 1.3“It's a strange thought, that culture is a product of man-made, unnatural things, that instead of culture shaping the architecture, architecture shapes the culture. Applied and fine art both affect the utility, consumption and business of normal life.
9. The metaphor between art and architecture [Axiom V]. Is a mental image. 1.4] where metaphor maps the structure of one domain onto the structure of another”. 1.4.1 for example, the “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 mental images. In this case metaphor is a mental image. “Each metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” In acting it is called a” handle” where your whole character’s peculiarity is remember by one acting device (accent, slang, twang, wiggle, walk, snort, etc) ;in architecture the building’s roof top, cladding, silhouette, interior finishes, lighting, gargoyles, entrance, rounded corners, etc. If the facade of a building is designed in one order of architecture you can presume the other parts are in like arrangements where the whole may be of that same order including its’ plan, section and details because of mapping and channeling one idea from one level to another. 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 sat. In geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those common elements where fit, coupling and joints occur.
10. Axiom VI. Since metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning: 1.4.3 what is built is first thought and conceived separately from building, as thinking and conceiving is separate from the outward expression, so metaphor is a process and architectural metaphor is a process and what we see is what the process issues; not the manifest metaphor. When we hear a symphony, poem; watch a dance or see a painting what we perceive is the residue of the artist composing and dealing with the similarities and apparent differences of medium, context, aesthetics and story.
11. Axiom VII. For both art and architecure metaphor-building clarifies our place, status and value. As Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning so works of architecture inform our social, psychological and political condition.
12. Axiom VIII. 1.4.4 Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor. The metaphor is engrafted with knowledge about the state of contemporary technology, scientific advancement, social taste and community importance, even an anonymous Florentine back ally’s brick wall, carved door, wall fountain, shuttered windows, building height, coloration of the fresco.
13. Axiom IX. 1.4.5 Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic in nature. It is the difference between the thing and what we perceive. Our perception of the building is the metaphor while the building is the evidence of the design process and the keys to unlock our mind.
14. Axiom X. 1.4.6 Metaphorical language (building) is a surface manifestation of conceptual (program, design and contact documents) metaphor. The built metaphor is the residue, excrement, product and periphery of the deep and complex reality of the building’s creative process and extant reality. As we don’t know the inner workings of our car and yet are able to drive so we can use our building. What we design and what we read not the metaphor but a surface manifestation of the concept metaphor. A concept which we can only know as well as we is able to discern metaphorical language. The construction and the metaphor beneath are mapped by the building being the manifestation of the hidden conceptual metaphor. To know the conceptual metaphor we must read the building.
15. Axiom XI. 1.4.7 Through much of our conceptual system is metaphorical; a significant part of it is non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical understanding. 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 .
16. Axiom XII. 1.4.8 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 matter. A structured building is a structured subject offering access to relatively abstract and unstructured subject matter. The whole of the conceptual 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. Hence architects translate their architectural conception from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two dimensional scaled drawings and then to real-life full-scale multi dimensions conventions consisting of conventional materials, building elements (doors, windows, stairs, etc).
17. Axiom XIII. Commonalities are the keys to mapping across conceptual domains Sifting through the program the architect seeks the “commonality” between the reality and experience to make the metaphor. Mapping is only possible when he knows the “commonplace”, the commonality, the characteristic common to both, the terms that both the source and the target have in common in which the mapping takes place. The architect’s design agenda and the user’s requirements find both their commonalities and differences. 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”. Architects translate their architectural conception from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two dimensional scaled drawings and then to real life full scale multi dimensions conventions consisting of conventional materials, building elements (doors, windows, stairs, etc).1.4.9 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. As the cartographer seeks lines, symbols and shadings to articulate the world reality so the reader’s choices of heretofore unrelated and 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 readers new vocabulary. As the reader can describe the route he can identify the building.
18. 1.4. 10 Each mapping (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, for example, reception area to receive people, doors and door frames, columns as vertical supports, parking spaces for cars, Iron and stained glass design patterns, and typical design details appropriated for a given building system.
19. 1.4.11 Aside from articulating a program architects carry-over their experiences with materials, physics, art, culture, building codes, structures, plasticity, etc. to form a 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 control documents. It is not until equipment, laborers and materials are brought to the side that 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. An informed user can read the building’s history from its inception to opening day.
20. 1.4.11 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 is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.
21. 1.4.11 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. The buildings’ very existence is a metaphor and may not be valued much more than an onomatopoeic.
22. 1.4.12 a. Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in every day experience and knowledge. b. Mapping and making metaphors are synonymous. c. 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. d. In this way making metaphors is the process of empathizing.
23. 1.4.13 A conceptual system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings which form a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system. Over the year’s society, cultures, families and individuals experience and store a plethora of mapping routines which are part of society’s 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.
24. 1.4.11 Architecture as a surrogate is accepted at face value. As a surrogate (a work of architecture) 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 metaphor bridge from the program, designs and contactors to a shelter and trusted habitat. The user enters and occupies the habitat with him having formulated but not articulated any of its characteristics. Yet it works. 1.4.11 “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of a. 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”. b. “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. As Weiss proclaims
c. 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.
d. Metaphors are accepted at face value and architecture is accepted at face value. Accustomed to surrogates 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. e. Like a linguistic, the building stands, like a great, stone dagger, 1.4.11 emphatic against the sky. The stair, the exit, the space calls, gives emphasis and is strongly expressive.
25. Axiom XIV. 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. 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.
26. 1.5.1 People ascertain the deep metaphor that underlies one or more surface metaphors by filling in terms of an implicit analogy”. A unique building metaphor may be reckoned by its apparent similarity to another from a previous experience. As a grain silo is to a methane gas plant and to oil tank storage; what may be implicit are the shapes, appurtenances, and locations.
27. 1.5.2 We see the architectural metaphor, we read its extent, we synapse, analogies and metaphorize absorbing its information, contextualizing and as much as possible 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.
28. 1.5.3 Architecture is often more suggestive and trusting rather than being pedantic; it leads and directs circulation, use recognition while abstracting shapes and forms heretofore unknown, but ergonometric. 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 which represents when explored and inert what we call beatiful, pleasurable and wonderful. Upon entering a traditional church in any culture we anticipate finding a common vocabulary of vestibule, baptistery, pews, chancel, and choir area including transepts, chapels, statuary, altar, apse, sacristy, ambulatory and side altars.
29. 1.5.4 Metaphor is in the mind: 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, and, it is there that the creator and the user may have a commonality (not commonplace). Ideally, if I design my own house, decorate my own room there will likely be that commonality. If an architect is selected from a particular neighborhood his metaphor will likely be sympathetic (common) to the culture of the area. Or, a concerted effort on the part of the design team to assemble the relevant and commonplace information.
30. 1.5.5 Architects make a spatial representation in which local subspaces can be mapped into points of higher-order hyper-spaces and vice versa is possible because they have a common set of dimensions. Architects organize broad categories of operations and their subsets seeing that they are different from each others so as to warrant a separate group and that their subsets fit because they have common operational, functional conditions, operations, models and object is. Hotel front and back-of-the-house operations; Hospital surgical from outpatient and both from administration and offices are obvious sets and subsets.
31. Axiom XV. a. Shelter and its controlled creation contains sensual ,graphic and strategic information fulfilling shelter needs by real deed rather than words of hope and future expectations. b. The building and not its metaphor is direct while its metaphor is indirect and being the sticks and stones of its manifestation. Yet the metaphor may be explained with language it would not accomplish the buildings shelter metaphor. The shelter prototype and its incarnation is itself indirect since its referent is obscured by contextual realities.
32. 1.6.1 There is a difference between the indirect uses of metaphor verses the direct use of language to explain the world.
33. 1.6.2 The distinctions and relationships between a. micro and macro metaphors and the way they can inform one another is as the form of design may refer to its program, or a connector reflects the concept of articulation as a design concept.
b. Where articulation is being jointed together as a joint between two separable parts in the sense of "divide (vocal sounds) into distinct and significant parts" or
c. Where an architect parses the program and reifies words to graphic representations bringing together desperate and seeming unrelated parts to join into parts and sub-parts to make a whole.
34. Axiom XVI. a. The two domains of the building and its context may have analogies that relate to both, the site and the building will absorb a high amount of pedestrian traffic: both are ambulatories and both guide and protect the pedestrian. 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. The neighborhoods walkways and the access to and through the building are analogous. As a child a Kressge 5 and 10 was built as a huge and wide corridor diagonally connecting Westchester Avenue with Southern Boulevard thus saving lots of steps, time and distance but providing a wonderful weather-free comfort- zone cutting through this block. The joining corners of the two avenues were filled with shops facing their streets which we could alternately frequent as an alternate. Alleys in big cities and Munich subway shopping malls are also examples of these design analogies, called galleries, alleys, mews, etc.
35. 1.7.1 Metaphors work by “reference to analogies that are known to relate to the two domains”.
36. Axiom XVII. a. A work of architecture has integrity if the whole and the parts share the same architectural vocabulary with respect to its building systems, materials and design philosophy. In a building with dominant 90 degree, cube and squares we do not expect to find plastic, curved and circular elements. b. A built metaphor with all of its metaphorical baggage call to mind another meaning and corresponding set of truths. c. The metaphor is not part of the building but is made from those meanings. The meanings of one and the meanings of another may be similar so that the other comes to mind.
37. 1.8.1 A “problem of the metaphor concerns the relations between the means of expression and design meaning, on the one hand, and architect’s meaning or sketch 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”.
38. 1.8.2 a. What are the principles which relate built design meaning to metaphorical design meaning” where one is comprehensive, complete and coordinated while the other is merely an incomplete scanty indication of a non specific.
39. 1.8.3 How does on thing remind us of another? 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 another meaning and corresponding set of truths”. Unlike a legal brief, specification and engineering document a work of architecture with all its metaphors tolerates variety of interpretations, innuendo and diverse translations. Building owners are asked to translate a two dimensional set of drawings ass fulfilling their design requirements to what might eventually be built.
40. Axiom XVIII. Building style and decoration are often adaptations of a former and existing building emphasizing economic and financial status, quest for status, adaptations to local common ground of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. Choice of structural, building systems, building height and color are often in the vernacular of the building use (office, residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) and the zoned and neighboring fashion. 1.9.1 a. Design is constrained by context with few absolutes save the “sate of the art”, culture, precedence and social opinion. b. Human cognition is fundamentally shaped by various processes of figuration (designs) (shaping into a particular figure (design). The ease with which many designs are comprehended are as often been attributed to the constraining influence of the context” ………..Including “the common ground of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes recognized as being shared by architects and users (clients, public). One can say one’s design is affected; affected by peer pressure (design profession) and the urge to communicate and adapt (win awards, professional recognition). Medieval German, French and Italian cities are replete with merchant building’s roofs configured, elongated and attenuated to be higher than others. Near the Rhine, Germany’s Trier is a fine example. Tropes are turn, twist, conceptual guises, and figurations
41. Axiom XIX. A habitable metaphor is not meant for the user to fully, continuously and forever recall all that went into its’ production. 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 contactors 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.
42. 1.10.1” A metaphor involves a nonliteral use of language”. The building design and the program cannot be a perfect mapping. A non-literal use of language means that what is said is to have an affect and but may not be specific. At each moment in its use the metaphor may mean different things, least of which may be any intended by its authors.
43. Axiom XX. a. Matching, copying and emulating the design of other buildings or adapting the design of one to the current project is adapted to the more familiar. In the Tyrol offices are often housed in larger chalets with all the roof, hardware, doors and flower boxes of the more typical residence. The new building is made to appear like the others. Often the signature of the original dominates the new. There is no attempt to hide the emulation. Users will easily transfer their experience from the familiar old to the emulated new. b. Appreciation is when a built metaphor as an abbreviated simile (a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose.”) designed to appreciate similarities and analogies. My office is like my home.
44. 1.11.1 The general public, users prefer the familiar, customary and traditional; forms and uses which are prevalent rather than a new dissimilar design. 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).
45. 1.11.2 For both art and architeucre: “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.
46. Axiom XXI. Buildings in one group often have more known versions than others. In one city exposed wide flanged steel structures may be preferred to the reinforced concrete in another, in Dubai and Qatar, the terms “high-rise”, “multi-story” and “iconic” are synonymous and known to represent commercial buildings. “Iconic” is the trigger for all the rest. High and rise used together recalls how the elevator and quest for grated real estate earnings encouraged the higher number of floors per single zoned building lot.
47. 1.12.1 Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization in cognitive science, where some members of a category are more central than others. 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 and Chicago are office building cities. I can see only a flash glimpse and I will know it is Manhattan.
48. 1.12.3 Most designers of shelters are predisposed to the geometry of the rectangle and its variations (with exceptions of amorphic and ergonometric) and present the completed design as its offspring and/or compounded variations. The built variation certainly refers to its base and vice versa. It is not just nice but necessary; otherwise it could not be built. Most building types and classical orders from Egypt, Greece and Rome to the skewed iconic towers of the emirates hearken back to their essence as a kind of rectangle.
49. 1.12.3 “Metaphors are generally used to describe something new by reference 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. 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”.
50. . Axiom XXII. Without having an apriori parte a design may evolve until a final design is achieved which is no more representative as whole from any other building of its type. Escarlata Partablela of Toledo brought me, a picnic lunch and her guitar to a small mountain across from her city. She urged me to sketch while she serenaded. After a while I noticed her wry smile as she scanned my sketches and when I noticed how familiar they looked she confessed that she had sat me down on the very spot El Greco sat to sketch “View Of Toledo”.
51. 1.13.1 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.
52. 1.13.2 Metaphor is reasoning using abstract characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight forward extension of its use in commonplace reasoning.
53. 1.13.3 “In processing analogy, people implicitly focus on certain kinds of commonalities and ignore others”.
54. 1.13.4 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.
55. 1.13.5 On the creative 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.
56. 1.13.6 “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.” 1.13.7 “Thus, an analogy is a way of aligning and focusing on rational commonalities independently of the objects in which those relationships are embedded.”
57. 1.13.8 “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 that to map isolated predicates. The systematicity principle reflects a tacit preference for coherence and inferential power in interpreting analogy”.
58. 1.13.9“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.”
59. Common to all arts incluidng architecure is [Axiom XXIII] more often than not designers are influenced by the existence of similar types than to re-invent themselves from scratch. 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. It is the commonplace and not the abstract necessity that communicates more readily. The architect is challenged to imbue in the design the more subtle analogy then the obvious.
60. 1.14.1 Interaction view” of metaphor where metaphors work by applying to the principle (literal) subject of the metaphor a system of “associated implications” characteristic of the metaphorical secondary subject.
61. 1.14.2 Metaphors simply impart their commonplace not necessity to their similarity or analogous.
62. Axiom XXIV. a. Architectural metaphors are all about names, titles, and the access so that the work provides 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 (is imbued with) 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. b. However objective, thorough and scientific the designer and the design tools, the work gets dubbed with information we may call style, personality, and identity above and beyond the program and its basic design. It is additional information engrafted into the form not necessarily overtly and expressly required.
63. c. Dubbing (imbuing) 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. d. Imbuing is often what distinguishes the famous from the ordinary architect and the way the architect dubs is what critics calls the art of architecture.
64. 1.15.1When dubbing is abandoned the link between language and the world disappears”, adding a sound track to a film is the best use of the word where the picture remains but the experience of the whole is changed. Now we have both picture and sound. Today’s works of architecture are minimal and only by dubbing the program can functionally superficial non-minimal features be added. However, the architect’s artistry (way of design, proportioning, arranging spaces, selections of materials, buildings systems, etc. can be dubbed to enhance an otherwise “plain vanilla” solution.
Axiom XXV. 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. 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. Architecture combines and confirms the secular (of this time), “how things really are” with the gestalt of personal, social, community and private importance.
1.16.1 a. consider new concepts as being characterized in terms of old ones (plus logical conjunctives)” b. 2.0 As William J. Gordon points out we make the strange familiar by talking about one thing in terms of another.
1.16.2 We would not 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 author’s messages. We learn the work. “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”.
1.16.3 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 .
1.16.4 Architects can express in design what cannot be expressed in words. About the difference between words (which are limited and specific to concepts Pylyshyn 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.
1.16.5 A work of architecture may begin with a design with our parte or program and the find ideas which fit. 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.
1.16.6 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.
1.16.7 Vocabulary and reality about a building metaphor not coincide as the perceptions and descriptions may only be to communicate and what communicates may not be the reality of the experiences of a work of architecture. “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”.
1.16.8 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.
Axiom XXVI. Modern architecture wants 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. 1.17.1 “Analogical transfer theory (“instructive metaphors create an analogy between a to-be-learned- system (target domain) and a familiar system (metaphoric domain
Axiom XXVII. 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. a. Visiting, sketching and writing about over seventy European cities I noted the character and ambience of each and the differences between one and another. 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. b. 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.
1.18.1 “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.
Axiom XXVIII. Many architects can make metaphors to overcome cognitive limitations and resort to graphics rather than language to explain the metaphor. Metaphor as a design act serves as a graphic tool for overcoming cognitive limitations. 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 worthy.
1.19.1 Metaphors have a way of extending our capacities for communications.
1.19.2 “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.”
1.19.3 Metaphor is the solution insofar as it encodes and captures the information:” transferring chunks of experience from well –known to less well known contexts;
1.19.4 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;
1.19.5 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 explains 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 language.
1.19.6 Built metaphors are vivid and indelible messages.” The mnemonic 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.”
Footnotes: 1.0 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 1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon 1.2 The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy. 1.3 In Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad' 1.4 The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff 1.4.11 "Surrogates," published by Indiana University Press. By Paul Weiss 1.5.0 Metaphor, induction, and social policy: The convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro 1.6.0 Figurative speech and linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock 1.7.0 Some problems with the emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart 1.8.0 Metaphor by John R. Searle Section on “Metaphor and Representation”: 1.9.0 Process and products in making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 1.10.0 Interpretation of novel metaphors by Bruce Fraser 1.11.0 Images and models, similes and metaphors by George A. Miller 1.12.0 How metaphors work by Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar 1.13.0 In the Metaphor and Science section of the book: The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science by Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski 1.14.0 Metaphor and theory change: What is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd 1.15.0 Metaphor in science by Thomas S. Kuhn 1.16.0 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) 1.17.0 The instructive metaphor: Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer 1.18.0 Metaphor and learning by Hugh G Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag 1.19.0 Educational uses of metaphor by Thomas G. Sticht 2.0 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 # =Wikopedia on the www. 4.0 WWW 5.0 “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”. 6.0 Webster’s standard dictionary 7.0 Identifying Metaphor in Language: a cognitive approach Style, fall, 2002 by Gerard J. Steen 8.0 The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: a perspective from Chinese by Ning Yu
Background: 507 words The first lectures "Architecture as the Making of Metaphors" were organized and conducted by Barie Fez-Barringten near the Art and Architecture building at the Museum of Fine Arts Yale University 11/02/67 until 12/04/67. The guest speakers were: Paul Weiss, William J. Gordon, Christopher Tunnard, Vincent Scully, Turan Onat, Kent Bloomer, Peter Millard, Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Forrest Wilson, and John Cage. Three major questions confront both the student and the practitioner of architecture: First, what is architecture? Second, why is architecture an art? Third, what are the architecture's organizing principles? Many answers to these questions have been provided by scholars and professionals, but seldom with enough rigors to satisfy close scrutiny. Nor have the questions been attached to proven and workable forms, so that the art could be developed beyond the limits of personal feelings. In 1967, a group of master students gathered to discuss the issuance of Perspecta 12, Yale's architectural journal - a discussion which summarized the sad state of the profession as well as the major environmental problems society was generating and failing to solve. The group had already been exposed to studies on the creative process, on contradictions of form, on the comprehension of relevant facts of an existing life style, on planning systems, in educational theories, and in building methodologies, yet it seemed that fundamental question inherent in the profession were being skirted rather than directly attacked. 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, to 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. Out of this concern grew the proposal for a lecture series wherein professional and scholars would not only bring forward the uses of metaphor but would also produce arguments against its use. For obviously there can be dissent from the metaphorical method; in this case the dissent (which focuses upon the possibility that the metaphor might obscure reality) actually reinforces the metaphor's wide structural applicability. Thus developed the symposium, which was presented by the Department of Architecture at Yale in the same year. 1967, with the intent "to illuminate, in order to refine and develop, the idea because it makes metaphors; that a work of architecture is a metaphor because it too blends certain programmatic specifics with concerns implicit to its own medium. "Those exploring these possibilities included Paul Weiss, William J. Gordon, Peter Millard, Robert Venturi and Charles Moore; the following statements are edited transcriptions of a small portion of the talks which were contributed One main Claim=Resolution-Answer=Ultimate claim+ Declarative statement Question = Controversy out of which comes issues which the advocate will have to uphold out of which comes claims Issues are the question inherent in the controversy and vital to the resolution Answer Issues sustain the resolution Issues inherent and vital to ht e resolution Is architecture an art? Complex argument What is the major question? Issues are questions inherent in a controversy and vital to the success of the resolution Issues are implicit in the resolution Issues can be located in different ways: Located by examining the text of the resolution Located by examining the underlying context Derived from a pattern of claims and responses Controversy_ (question ____________________________________resolution Answer Issue Question__________________________________________Claim answer the issues Question Question Question • Stasis in conjecture is whether the act occurred • Stasis in definition concern what the act should be called implicitly concedes conjecture • Stasis in quality concerns whether the act is justifies implicitly concerns conjecture and definition Resolution=Stasis: Architecture is art because it too makes metaphors 1. Is there a problem? What is it? Why is architecture an art? Without a definition of why architecture is an art educators, practitioners, clients, and users cannot with a high degree of certainty equate, judge, and negotiate works of architecture. 2. Where is credit or blame due? Concerned about the fiduciary role between owners and contactors Educators, practitioners, clients, and users will dilute the certainty and value of the architect’s contract documents with the ambiguity of art. Will the proposal solve the problem? On balance, will the proposal be better? For resolutions of definitions, the topoi can be identified Is the interpretation relevant? Is it fair? Now should we choose among competing interpretations? Technical Value Iconic identity authenticate