Proceedings Book 2.Indb

294 SEEKING THE CITY Emerging Pedagogy: Capturing the Expressive Act BRIAN AMBROZIAK University of Tennessee-Knoxville A fundamental process of higher learning is that not as readily accessible to the quick sketch such of abstraction and synthesis. The process of ab- as color and texture. In looking at these visual straction reduces sensory input to its fundamental memoirs, select access is granted into the mind of components and allows for the establishment of a the architect. Does this however provide glimpses mental catalogue. These derived essences exist as into to the origins of the creative process? In the one’s artistic conscience. The intensity by which essay Creative Writers and Day Dreaming, Freud these images are engraved varies. The architect writes, Le Corbusier emphasized the act of drawing and its correlation to memory when he wrote, “We laymen have always been intensely curious to know—like the Cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto—from what sources that strange being, “When one travels and works with visual things… the creative writer, draws his material, and how he one uses one’s eyes and draws, so as to fi x deep manages to make such an impression on us with down in one’s experience what is seen… All this it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, means fi rst to look, and then to observe, and fi - we had not even thought ourselves capable. Our nally to discover. Once the impression has been interest is only heightened the more by the fact recorded by the pencil, it stays for good, entered, that, if we ask him, the writer himself gives us no registered, inscribed.”1 explanation, or none that is satisfactory; and it is not at all weakened by our knowledge that not This process of discovery through drawing as de- even the clearest insight into the determinants of fi ned by Le Corbusier is fundamental to the way his choice of material and into the nature of the art of creating imaginative form will ever help to in which an architect establishes visual arguments make creative writers of us.”4 based in history and culture. Michael Graves com- mented with regard to drawing that, In his paper Dostoevsky and Parracide, Freud de- nies that he, or psychoanalysis, will ever pene- “No matter what medium I chose, my drawings were always analytical. It was important to me to trate the sources of creativity. He writes, “Before reveal some salient characteristic of the architec- the problem of the creative artist analysis must, ture, perhaps its frontality, the layering of a spa- alas, lay down its arms.”5 These statements with tial sequence, or simply the quality of a surface regard to the creative process describe an act that as it catches the light. I thought that if any one of my drawings was viewed as a travel scene, I had is anything but a process, a term that implies a failed, since it would be merely picturesque.”2 series of actions and operations that are perhaps quantifi able. While one might look for direct con- Thus, “it goes without saying that what the archi- nections between an architect’s drawings and his tect chooses to draw, using his sketchbook as a built work, these literal one-to-one associations record of observation, reveals the examination of tend to be forced. It is more often the case that his artistic conscience.” the architect draws from a multitude of experienc- The travel sketchbooks of architects are typically es and transforms and shapes them throughout fi lled with images of buildings and the landscapes the design process. While not providing a concise they inhabit. Their photographs capture aspects roadmap, an architect’s drawings are one piece of EMERGING PEDAGOGY 295 a vast puzzle that does provide valuable insight one’s ability to see an image, abstract it, and to the evolution of an architectural design. Obvi- eventually recall and combine it as part the cre- ously, the more pieces one has at one’s disposal, ative process. The goal of the course was to ad- the more believable one’s map of the artistic con- dress many of the issues raised by Arnheim and to science becomes. reestablish a method of visual thinking. An interest in the possibility of mapping the artis- The fi rst assignment for the seminar required the tic conscience led to my development of a seminar students to hone their senses through an analysis entitled Visual Thinking. The title of the course of the Tennessee River. The examination required referenced Rudolf Arnheim’s book and essay by that they formulate an idea about the attributes the same title. Arnheim’s research was ground- of an object through investigation, that they fi rst breaking in its understanding of developmental look, then observe, and fi nally discover. To be- stages of visualization and representation. His gin, each student identifi ed three attributes that emphasis on visual thinking was in large part reac- in some form described an essence of the river. tionary. A signifi cant shift had taken hold during These three ideas were then investigated through the Enlightenment, away from a visual language sketching, writing, photography, model building, or to a system of higher intellect defi ned primarily any other creative form of documentation. Hav- by the written text. This method of conceptual- ing identifi ed a single attribute on which to focus, izing resulted in a disembodied system based in they began a more in-depth analysis. One objec- words and symbols and yielding a visually illiter- tive of the project was to allow students a venue ate society. Arnheim wrote, to expand beyond their own preconceived notions about methods of representation and analysis. “We are the victims of an inveterate tradition ac- Through the investigation it became quite clear cording to which thinking takes place remote from that the method of formal analysis by which they perceptual experience. Since the senses are be- lieved to be concerned with individual, concrete had been trained to look at architecture was not events, they are limited to collecting raw mate- easily transferred to non-architectural objects rial of experience. It takes “higher” powers of the or experiences. The object did not contain the mind to process the sensory data.”6 “words” through which they had been instructed to defi ne architecture. This structured language His belief that “many educators and psychologists includes terms such as hierarchy, threshold, layer- are still reluctant to admit that perceptual thought ing, circulation, fi gure/fi eld, rotation, proportion, processes are as exacting and inventive and re- geometry, repetition, etc., all valid as reductive quire as much intelligence as the handling of intel- generators for understanding space, but not suffi - lectual concepts”7 led him to challenge the state of cient for expansive or temporal analysis. So what education in this country. He writes, was it about the system of formal analysis that did not easily transfer to an object outside of architec- “Consequently, Western education has been concerned foremost with words and numbers. In our ture? The psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig writes, schools, reading, writing and arithmetic are prac- ticed as skills that detach the child from sensory “There is certainly virtue in making the student experience, and this estrangement intensifi es dur- aware that any shape, however complex, can ul- ing the high school and college years as the de- timately be built up from the simplest elements. mands of words and numbers grow and childish This awareness makes for clean athletic design. things must be put aside. Only in kindergarten But the awareness of basic elements could also and fi rst grade is education based on the coop- be misused as a fully conscious control of the en- eration of all the essential powers of the human tire working process. An excessive preoccupation mind; thereafter this natural and sensible proce- with the geometric constituents of a design could dure is dismissed as an obstacle to training in the make the student ignore the drastic transforma- proper kind of abstraction.”8 tion which the single elements undergo as they fuse into a more complex overall structure… In language teaching it may be justifi ed to start by These thoughts describe an inability by society training the student to assemble sentences from to effectively comprehend graphic material, a the basic elements of language according to the kind of visual illiteracy. The paralleling of scien- rules of syntax and grammar. But if the student tifi c methods in architecture has had a profound is too content with the mechanical assembly of his sentences he mail fail to grasp the spirit of a living effect on methods of architectural analysis and language (emphasis mine).”9 296 SEEKING THE CITY The obvious conclusion was that the students had own method of invention that advances its course been analyzing a spatial phenomenon through the through uninhibited metaphorical association. use of words that, by defi nition, have clear and The temporary nature of fl ickering images on a teachable images attached. In his forward to the screen provides a refl ection of our own creative translation of Durand’s Précis of the Lectures on consciousness and a familiar setting for discovery. Architecture at the École Polytechnique, Antoine The virtual realm exists as an environment capa- Picone points out that as an art of composition ble of easily transforming and navigating layers of and decomposition, the analytical method, fi rst information and possesses the added dimension introduced by Locke in his Essay Concerning Hu- of time while incorporating sound to establish a man Understanding, grew increasingly general- rhythm and a mood.

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