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Architectural Design and Imagination

Presented at the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and
New Zealand (SAHANZ), Newcastle, NSW, 2010

Associate Professor Harry Margalit
The University of New South Wales


Abstract
Whereas it is a truism that architectural design requires imagination, the specific
role that imagination plays is dealt with less clearly in writings on architectural
design. Drawing on a selection of architectural theorists, this paper argues that
there has been a tendency in recent years to divide architectural design into
rationally verifiable parts, and those that are difficult to verify or evaluate
rationally. Using philosophical categories of imagination, this paper argues that it
contributes to design in specific ways due its unique characteristics. The paper
then introduces Piagets notion of intelligence as the means by which imagination
acts upon reality. Because this notion of intelligence is a unitary one, it
emphasises the common aspects of rational and social validation of architectural
values. Thus by stressing the interplay of imagination and intelligence in the act
of designing, the paper seeks to arrive at a view of architectural design which
bridges the divide between what Yehuda Kalay terms the quantifiable and non-
quantifiable aspects of architecture.


Introduction
Imagination, according to the philosopher Leslie Stevenson, can be categorised into 12
conceptions. In Stevensons formulations these range from the simplest form, wherein
imagination is simply the ability to think of something not presently perceived, but spatio-
temporally real, through to more complex formulations that engage with aesthetics.
1
In this
sense, design engages with many of his conceptions by definition, since it is intimately
involved with imagining things that are not perceived but that also carry cultural and aesthetic
meaning. The operations of design may deal with these on a daily basis, but architectural
design theory has struggled with categories of imagination, especially the validation of the
architectural imagination. Certain aspects of design, such as planning or responses to
specific criteria, are dealt with more easily, but other areas within design which incorporate
aesthetics or cultural context have proven trickier to both theorise and to render instrumental
in the sense of describing how to do them. This paper begins with a selective survey of
architectural theorists to highlight these theoretical successes and failures. It will then
introduce concepts from developmental psychology and philosophy to propose a more
inclusive model of the relationship between imagination and design, in particular one which
ties the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of design together.

Models of architectural designing
In the 1960s, according to Geoffrey Broadbent, Few new buildings really pleased the users
and the architectural profession as a whole was viewed with considerable suspicion by the
society it was supposed to serve.
2
For Broadbent, this provided the impetus to launch his
extended inquiry into architectural design published as Design in Architecture. Broadbent
adopted the emerging methods of quantifying aspects of human behaviour, and turned to the
human sciences to see if they could clarify the process of design. He provided an extensive
list of those sciences which might be useful to architecture, ranging from Anatomy to
Sociology. But of particular interest here is his attempt to describe all aspects of architectural
design in terms which render them capable of rationalisation. To his credit, he attacks the
problem aware of previous efforts which have dismembered architectural design, such as the
attempts at standardisation by Hannes Meyer in 1928: Thinking of building in functional and
biological terms as giving shape to the living process leads logically to pure construction
3

Indeed, Broadbent is at pains to include a survey of creative techniques as a distinct and
thoughtful chapter. He also categorises architectural form as deriving from 4 methods:
pragmatic, iconic, analogical and canonic. Of these, the use of analogy seems most
appealing to Broadbent, given the latitude it allows in the invention of form by insisting only
on the loose rules of analogical correspondence.

Thinking about imagination within the parameters he set, and acceptance of the necessary
iterative shuttling inherent in architectural design, is a hallmark of Broadbents writing, and
has aided the popularity of his work. Nonetheless it remains marked by the bifurcation of the
design process into that which can draw from a scientific or quantifiable approach, such as
space planning or environmental control (or indeed certain creative techniques), as opposed
to the harder to pin down cultural content of an architectural work. Broadbent, perhaps not
surprisingly given that he was concerned with a certain view of architecture that coalesced
around invention, seems little concerned with the cultural criteria through which the validation
of the architectural imagination is effected.

The problem was thrown into sharp relief by work undertaken by John Gero and Thorsten
Schnier and their collaborators at the University of Sydney. The team isolated specific
graphic characteristics from the work of Piet Mondrian and Frank Lloyd Wright, using a
technique modelled on genetic engineering. Having isolated these characteristics, they
showed that these could be recombined to produce hybrid graphic patterns.
4
The effect is
convincing at first sight in that the particular contributions of each artist seem evident, but the
starting premise remains the cultural value accorded to both Mondrian and Wright, a
judgement whose workings are opaque, and of limited interest, to the researchers.

The interaction of architectural design and computing is more imaginatively surveyed by
Yehuda Kalay in his Architectures New Media.
5
Kalay divides design into four intertwined
phases: problem analysis, solution synthesis, evaluation, communication.
6
Of the synthesis
phase, he states that

It is not a rational process, for despite Louis Sullivans famous proclamation that
form follows function, no such causal relationship has ever been found (at least
not in architecture) between form and function. Instead this is an intuitive step, in
which the designer finds an arrangement of forms, materials, views, orientations,
lighting conditions, and other elements that come together into a holistic
ensemble, where the parts support one another and have an intrinsic structure of
their own.
7


This acceptance of the limited rationality of the design process is predicated on a view of the
rational as conforming to a discernible causal chain, made possible by the view of design as
essentially purposeful and hence capable of achieving well-defined goals.
8
This enables
Kalay to postulate that in order to overcome the limitations of problem analysis, which is a
rational phase, designers rely on intuition and creativity. In the evaluation phase, Kalay
divides its operations between evaluating quantifiable qualities and evaluating non-
quantifiable qualities. This schism runs through all the attempts to describe the process of
design cited above.

Imagination in Design
If approached from the standpoint of imagination, then the schism is less evident. Following
Stevenson, one can apply a number of the conceptions of imagination he indentifies to
architectural design. For example:

2) The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio-
temporal world
9) The ability to sensuously appreciate works of art or objects of natural beauty
without classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as useful
10) The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation

To this could be added 5) The ability to entertain mental images, and 12) The ability to
create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of life.
9
In discussion of
the imagination, then, the difference between quantifiable and non-quantifiable qualities has
less meaning because both can conform to common broad conceptions of imagination, such
as expressed in 2) and 5). They serve to tell us something about the functioning of
architectural design rather than the imagination. Even the introduction of terms such as
rational and irrational is of limited use here, since the most rational design also involves the
imagination insofar as it entails thinking of something not presently perceived, even if that is
a mathematical relationship.

Imagination, when viewed in this way, is fundamental to design but is nonetheless described
in a way that is too basic to shed much light on its operations. Its relationship to creativity is
almost a truism, as the philosopher Berys Gaut notes, but this elision too invites closer
examination. Gaut frames the question thus: if the creative imagination exists, can we say
anything about how it works, perhaps revealing something about its characteristic forms or
modes of operation?
10


For Gaut creativity is not simply the production of something original, but it is also used as a
value-term, which refers in people to a kind of excellence or virtue.
11
He fleshes this out into
the kind of making that involves flair in producing something which is original (saliently new)
and which has considerable value. The introduction of the term flair here denotes
intentionality, to distinguish this making from accidental or mechanically made uniqueness.
Gaut distinguishes between two modes of creativity, one passive and one active. The former
exists anecdotally in moments where deep consideration of a problem yields a solution which
seems to emanate from unconscious processes, as in the celebrated claim of Friedrich von
Kekul, whose discovery of the circular structure of the benzene molecule came to him in
dream of snakes swallowing their tails. The latter, which is more relevant to architectural
design, involves the subject using their imagination as part of creating. For Gaut imagination
is peculiarly suited to be the vehicle of active creativity...because of the kind of intentional
state that it is.
12
Here he contrasts imagination with belief and intention:

Imagination lacks the intrinsic ends of belief and intention. To imagine something
is, as we have seen, not to be committed to its truth or falsity...Nor does
imagination involve a commitment to performing an achievable action...one can
try out different views and approaches by imagining them, without being
committed either to the truth of the claims or to acting on ones imaginings.
13


In answer to how the creative process works, Gaut turns to Immanuel Kants aesthetics. He
posits the centrality of metaphor in prompting originality, although this still begs the question
of the requirement of virtue, that is the creation needs to be exemplary. For Gaut metaphor-
making is a paradigm of creative imagination, for in good metaphors an imaginative act
brings together two otherwise disparate domains, and in so doing invites us to look at some
object in an original yet apt fashion.
14


The resonance with Broadbent is clear here. Although Gaut uses the term metaphor, and
Broadbent analogy, both rely on associations which are neither strictly causal nor
determined, and thus facilitate originality. Yet this begs the question of the functioning of
metaphor and analogy themselves. They may fulfil the condition of being scientifically
untestable, and hence non-quantifiable, but is their presence sufficient to constitute good
design, and in what way do they lend virtue to design?

Put simply, the approach of Broadbent, for example, might consider an admirable piece of
architecture in view of its verifiable integration of the categories of interest that it addresses
planning, utility, even metaphor. But it is unlikely that these categories would be the subject
of an evaluation by Manfredo Tafuri, for example, who would in all likelihood be more
interested in the historical continuities and tensions that inform the work.
15
Broadbents
categories may not, in addition, be sufficient to describe which buildings will win national
architecture awards, since the criteria may be partly verifiable and partly a reflection of
national aspirations in other words, part form and part content.

Although it may appear hard to bridge, in reality the divide between form and content is
transcended in the act of designing, and one could argue that a good critique would also be
able to incorporate both. It seems that the divide is exaggerated when we place academic
demands on the act of analysis: the positivist verification of form and the historicist
verification of content are grafted onto specific analytic traditions. And there are, of course,
others which evaluate architecture from viewpoints such as the phenomenological or
perceptual, to name just two.

Can criticism and validation of buildings deal with the form/content divide as easily as
designers do? The process of architectural design employs the imagination in proposing and
refining things not yet in existence. But the virtue buildings display must be generated on a
broader field yet, one that orders their aptness or quality to enable us to say one building is
better than another. This quality seems to elude poetics, analogy and metaphor in any
prescriptive way, although we can say that one poetics is more evocative than another, or
that one analogy is more apt than another.

What might this broader field look like? It would need to incorporate a unified model of
thinking, one that allows for both the creative process involving imagination, as well as the
critical thinking that allows for evaluation of the non-quantifiable aspects of design, to use
Kalays term. Here I propose the concept of intelligence, or rather a particular (and perhaps
unfashionable) view of this concept, as a defining structure of this higher-order field. The
view of intelligence I am proposing to use derives from the stark pronouncement by Piaget
that Intelligence is an adaptation.
16


Intelligence
The nature of intelligence continues to be problematic, despite decades of investigation into
the workings of the mind. Grasping it, in the first instance, proves elusive despite its ubiquity.
Jean Piaget sketches out a view which is notable for its scope: Only intelligence, capable of
all its detours and reversals by action and by thought, tends towards an all-embracing
equilibrium by aiming at the assimilation of the whole of reality and the accommodation to it
of action
17
The ambition of Piagets view is particularly useful if we pursue an idea of
intelligence that is not reductive, in the sense that it sells short the very attribute devoted to
its uncovering. This ambition to understand but not to limit is analogous to the
philosopher John Searles project to defend the profound nature of consciousness against a
biological reductionism.

Searles project rests on the question: Howcan we make our conception of ourselves fully
consistent and coherent with the account of the world that we have acquired from the natural
sciences, especially physics, chemistry and biology? For Searle, this problem or set of
problems is the most important problem in philosophy, and indeed there is a sense in
which, in our particular epoch, it is the only major problem in philosophy.
18
For Searle,
attempts to explain consciousness in terms of neural relationships can only succeed if we
accept that the quality of consciousness occurs at a higher level than the working of neural
networks:

The two crucial relationships between consciousness and the brain, then, can be
summarized as follows: lower level neuronal processes in the brain cause
consciousness, and consciousness is simply a higher level feature of the system
that is made up of the lower neuronal elements.
There are many examples in nature where a higher feature of a system is caused
by lower level elements of that system, even though the feature is a feature of the
system made up of those elements. Think of the liquidity of water or the
transparency of glass.
19


The issue has been thrown into sharp relief by the rapid development of computers within an
evolutionist paradigm. The power of computers enables researchers to set up simple
evolutionary rules and watch them unfold through myriad iterations. This modelling can give
rise to the confusion described by Searle:

The computational model of consciousness stands to consciousness in the same
way the computational model of anything stands to the domain being modelled.
Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will
leave us all wet. But they make the mistake of supposing that the computational
model of consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in both
cases.
20


The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for intelligence. The development of computational
forms of intelligence, in a limited sense, should not be taken as intelligence per se (nor
should computational emulations of design).

Intelligence and Design
The act of designing, and the coherence of the designed object, seems to work against ideas
of intelligence that are fragmented or multiple.
21
The synthesizing work of designing admits to
many manifestations of intelligence, but this is different to many intelligences. Jacob
Bronowskis statement (cited by Kalay) that design is the epitome of intelligent behaviour
opens another reading: that design is a manifestation of intelligence that reveals the structure
of intelligence.
22


This can be gleaned from some of the most basic formulations offered by Piaget of
intelligence. In The Psychology of Intelligence he offers a slightly different phrasing to that
cited above. He states that If intelligence is adaptationadaptation must be described as an
equilibrium between the action of the organism on the environment and vice versa.
23
Thus It
is the most highly developed form of mental adaptation, that is to say, the indispensable
instrument for interaction between the subject and the universe when the scope of this
interaction goes beyond immediate and momentary contacts to achieve far-reaching and
stable relations.
24
Furthermore, we can say that behaviour becomes more intelligent as the
pathways between the subject and the objects on which its acts cease to be simple and
become progressively more complex.

The means of moving from immediate and momentary contacts to far reaching and stable
relations, following Gaut, is the imagination. In this sense it is an operation of intelligence, a
means by which the greater objective of these relations can be brought into existence even
though they have no spatio-temporal existence when they are conceived. Piaget did not
engage specifically with imagination understood in this way he associates it with childhood
fantasy, a form of thinking which recedes in formal adult thinking. For Gaut, however,
imagination is a key element in creativity, a highly valued form of adult thinking.

A key point here is that the forms of imagination that are pertinent, in fact crucial, to creativity
aid accommodation to reality, that is rational thinking. We see no tension between rationality
and creativity in the sciences or in art, where creativity has the highest social value. The
accommodation they foster is of the highest order: the difficulty in design theory has been in
describing how this value is founded.

The dilemma outlined in the first part of the paper, that between the verifiable aspects of
design laid out by Broadbent, for example, and the social imprimatur represented by acts
such as architecture awards, are both aspects of the functioning of intelligence and subject to
the proviso that intelligence recognises itself, that is its operations of verification work easily
across both these spheres. Piaget casts even wider in stressing the unity of intelligence:

What common sense calls feelings and intelligence, regarding them as two
opposed faculties, are simply behaviour relating to persons and behaviour
affecting ideas or things; but in each of these forms of behaviour, the same
affective and cognitive aspects of action emerge, aspects which are in fact
always associated and in no way represent independent faculties.
25


The study of architectural history underlines this. Architectural history, or any historical
analysis or proposition related to buildings, relies on a trans-historic identification, a
recognition of intelligence concretized. The meaning or significance we ascribe to buildings in
history relies entirely on an archaeology of intelligence in order that the results be intelligible.
(This is a further argument against the idea of discrete intelligences: it seems doubtful that
Howard Gardners seven intelligences, for instance, would be recognised as distinct at points
distant in time from ours.)
26


The problem of historical interpretation lies astride the hard-to-locate line of the historicity of
intelligence versus its ubiquity. Clearly the flowering of intelligence, as evident in architecture,
is profoundly of its time. Yet the contemporary observer is capable of resonances with the
original makers, particularly within traces of a shared cultural tradition.
27
Here we see the
workings of imagination, understood in this sense as the capacity to project a set of
relationships into a past on the basis of artefacts as evidence. And the product of this
research, perhaps a book, will be subject to the scrutiny of a reader who may be more or less
convinced, as the last stage of a series of intelligences reflecting upon each other. As
Patrizia Lombardo wrote at a time of re-evaluation of architectural history:

History can be weak or strong: weak when it is a collection of references put
together almost at random, strong when it is the understanding of the
interferences and interventions between different levels of reality. History can be
the whimsy of using ornaments that recall past styles, or the tragic knowledge of
our condition in the world.
28


Putting Imagination to Work
Whereas there are many types of imagination, in mature thinking those that are key to
creativity are not associated with simple fantasy. Mature imagination is well aware of its
relationship to reality. That it is different to belief or intention gives it a particular responsibility
because it can range so freely. In mature thinking the value of imagination, I propose, is
established through recognition of its responsibility to reality, acting through creativity.

Creativity it is often victim to misconceptions. It is a highly structured activity, and subject to
intricate mastery of a range of relationships and rules before it can flourish. James Kaufman
and John Baer stress this:

The results from music and the visual arts have been consistent in demonstrating
the important role of expertise in innovation. Even the renowned composers and
visual artists whom we have examined required years of what can fairly be called
practice, before they produced breakthrough works. Thus, the demands of
expertise are seen even at those high levels of achievement. Furthermore, in
many cases creative breakthroughs have been built on the content of expertise.
29


The creativity of architecture is an extension of everyday acts of resolving dilemmas,
aestheticizing ones surroundings and considering the sequence and success of how things
are put together. Creative architecture is these elevated, within a context of expertise, but it
does not involve a distinctive faculty that is either present or absent. The discussion of what
constitutes a good piece of architecture is the recognition of both expertise and creativity in
the sense of inflection, composition, organisation or balance, to list just a few criteria. This
discussion is not limited because it revolves around the mutual recognition of intelligence,
and as such the judgement is predicated on the assertion of the understanding and insight of
those making the judgement. Thus an act of criticism is underpinned by the implied
intelligence of the critic as expressed in the critique an act that requires reference to the
workings of critique as well as those of architecture.

In summary, then, the social value of creativity rests on the critical recognition of an
imaginative act cognisant of its responsibility to establish far-reaching and stable relations
between a subject and the universe.

Conclusion (or how is this useful to architectural judgement?)
Writings on architectural design have a tendency to divide the act into two distinct parts
those elements of design that can be described as discernible using terms and
understanding drawn from the sciences, including those described as the human sciences,
and those that rest more on a cultural understanding but which have a social value based on
their creativity. The exercising of intelligence, it has been argued, encompasses both the
judgements required to create a culturally validated piece of architecture are no less an
expression of intelligence than those required to create a well functioning one.

The summary offered above is intended to take this observation one step further. If the duty
of the critic (or a designer exercising their critical faculties) is to argue for the validity of a
particular work as an expression of intelligence, then the argument is framed not as an
evaluation based on different intelligences but in terms of historically honed modes of
argument. The contribution of theory, for example, teaches how a work of architecture may
be critiqued using terms and scales derived from the political realm, or the economic, to cite
but two.

Critique cannot be reductive in the sense of limiting its terms as a matter of its operation.
Intelligence manifests across all terms because it strives towards Piagets mature
accommodation of action to reality in all possible ways. The mature imagination has the
capacity to work with action and reality in a projective way, that is with materials and
relationships not immediately evident or perceived. This allows the iterative play of
relationships that is central to design, without committing the resources and effort required to
make the design real until a set of relationships is established by the designer, and decisions
made accordingly.

To return, then, to Kalays quantifiable and non-quantifiable aspects of architecture. The first
yields to evaluations which are established through specific branches of knowledge whose
internal relations appear stable, such as mathematics. The second yields to evaluations
whose internal relations are historically complex. Each building is a particular manifestation
of these, brought into a unity by the breadth of the designers imagination in projecting
relationships and imaginatively assessing these. A good critic can delineate these, and
compare them through an act of imagination to other possible relationships. If found wanting,
then the building is of limited interest. If the building manifests relations of the highest order,
then the architecture gathers the interest of the viewer in a moment of both social validation
and the pleasure of intelligence recognising itself.

Endnotes

1
Leslie Stevenson, Twelve conceptions of imagination, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003), 238
259.
2
Geoffrey Broadbent, Design in Architecture, (London: David Fulton, 1988), xi. First published in
1973.
3
Meyer, cited in Broadbent, Design in Architecture.
4
See Thorsten Schnier and John S Gero, From Mondrian to Frank Lloyd Wright:Transforming
Evolving Representations at
http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgero//publications/1998/98SchnierGeroACDM.pdf, accessed 6/04/10.
5
Yehuda Kalay, Architectures New Media: Principles, Theories and Methods of Computer-Aided
Design, (Cambridge, Mass., : MIT, 2004).
6
Kalay, Architectures New Media, 10.
7
Kalay, Architectures New Media, 11.
8
Kalay, Architectures New Media, 5.
9
Stevenson, Twelve conceptions of imagination, 238.
10
Berys Gaut, Creativity and imagination, in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds), The Creation of Art,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149.
11
Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 149.
12
Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 159.
13
Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 160.
14
Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 165.
15
See, for example, Manfredo Tafuri, Introduction to Theories and History of Architecture in Joan
Ockman (ed), Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, (New York: Rizzoli, 1993),
450-455.
16
Jean Piaget, The Origin of Intelligence in the Child, (London: Penguin, 1977), 15.
17
Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1960), 9.
18
John Searle, Consciousness and Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.
19
Searle, Consciousness and Language, 9.
20
Searle, Consciousness and Language 16.
21
As expounded by Gardner, for example. See Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The theory of
multiple intelligences, (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
22
Kalay, Architectures New Media, 1.
23
Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, 7.
24
Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, 7
25
Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, 6.
26
See Gardner, Frames of Mind.

27
On teasing out this key relationship in art scholarship, see Suzi Gablik, Progress in Art, (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1976). She writes Piagets view is that cognitive structures are built up
progressively from the historical as well as from the psychological point of view: historically speaking,
these structures may be either invented or discovered by particular individuals, but they then become
integrated into a single intellectual organism 33.
28
Patrizia Lombardo, Architecture as an Object of Thought in Marco Diani and Catherine Ingraham
(eds), Restructuring Architectural Theory, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 81.
29
James C. Kaufman and John Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29.

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