View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Frontiers of Architectural Research (2014) 3, 331–333 HOSTED BY Available online at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/foar COLUMN Creativity real and imagined in architectural education Alexander Tzonis Department of Architecture, University of Technology Delft, Delft 2611 CE, The Netherlands Received 24 July 2014; accepted 5 August 2014 Of all aspects of architecture what mystifies most the century Italian architect and sculptor Cavalier Bernini designing layman is the power of architects as ‘creators’, their in public, supposed to be following divine instructions. apparent capability to invent, conceive and construct ‘out The creed was carried on up into our days, not only in the of nothing’ unprecedented daring forms. West but also globally, though it was deprived if its In the West, the idea of ‘creators’,defined as those who theological ramifications. The contemporary belief stresses can ‘make things out of nothing’, is very old. It had and has even more the ingenious abilities of, what came to be far reaching influences, not always benign, that are still felt known since the 1980s, the ‘star’ architect as ‘creator’. today in many disciplines related to the production of the While the medieval belief had the ‘architect creator’ human-made environment including architecture and archi- creating communicating directly with God, the modern tectural education. In the broad sense of the term, (that ‘man in the street’ is under the impression that the comprised poets but also the makers of machines), the architect acts autonomously, invents, brings out into his definition of ‘creator’, one who ‘makes something out of work his, not yet seen before, private imaginations. nothing’, goes at least as far back as Plato's Symposium However, the contemporary scientific view contrasts with (II,201,c), while the specific idea of the architect as this view of the layman. For scientists today, the general idea ‘creator’, emerged later, during the late Middle Ages and of creativity as the ability to ‘make something new out of the Renaissance, when the architect was called demi-god, nothing’ as well as the specificnotionofthequasi-god ‘come semidei’–to quote Cesare Cesariano, the Renais- ‘creative’ architect are considered superstitions, confusing, sance military architect and theoretician of architecture – and potentially, even harmful, as many superstitions are. They “ Wittkower, R., 1962. Architectural Principles in the Age areseenasmisdirectingtheunderstandingofthenatureof of Humanism, London Lefaivre, Liane and Alexande Tzonis, human creativity, a most important cognitive quality of human 2004, Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary beings,andintheparticularcaseofarchitecture,obscuring ” History, from 1000 to 1800, London and his gift to give the comprehension by non-experts of how architects work in birth to new forms was claimed to be miraculous. reality, their epistemological, ideological, and moral presup- Accordingly,thebeliefinthewondrous nature of architects positions, and how they influence the social and physical ‘creating’‘out of nothing’‘microcosms’ was so strong that quality of the environment and of everyday life. people gathered to watch the famous ‘inspired’ seventeenth Oddly enough, contemporary press, not only the popular but also the professional one, tends to prolong the enduring myth of imaginary, mystical creativity. E-mail address: [email protected] “However, in China newspapers such as China Daily and Peer review under responsibility of Southeast University. People's Daily have occasionally published articles critical of http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2014.08.001 2095-2635/& 2014. Higher Education Press Limited Company. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. 332 A. Tzonis the recent architectural practices that architectural editors sector and the state in designing, planning, and producing the have been often been silent about. human-made environment is shrinking all over the world, the Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis, ‘Region Making’, ‘semi-god’ architect translated as ‘star-architect’,helpto Journal of New Arts, 2013, China Academy of Art, legitimizing the rights of private development to promote Hangzhou”. unreal needs and sustain the rightfulness of fabricated values Paradoxically, so does architectural education in many dictated by the market economy inciting consumption, and to places of the world. And the results are not so positive conceive and construct buildings and even parts of cities, neither for the accountability of the profession nor for beyond public scrutiny. society. It does not take much to show that as the archaic semi-god Even more puzzling is the fact that little attention was creative architect did not deal with the social and environ- paid by the architectural press and by architectural educa- mental quality of his environment (not to be blamed since it tors to studies carried out by historians and anthropologists would have been absurdly anachronistic if he did so) so the who, since the beginning of the twentieth century, investi- contemporary ‘star-creative-architect’ suppresses such issues. gated, wrote, and demystified the political function of the Thus, even the recent cognitive science studies that architect as ‘creator semi-god’ in archaic and later in focused empirically on the phenomenon of human creativity absolutist societies which they identified having been to a looking into the way mathematicians and engineers, chess great extend the legitimization of the supposed God-given players and other ‘miraculous’ champions ‘create’ new rights of the despotic ruler to rule. Why did this happen? solutions to tackle unprecedented hard problems were “Lefaivre, Liane and Alexande Tzonis, 2004, ibid”. ignored. The studies demonstrated that creation is far from Why this long term apparent continuity between the making something out of nothing a privilege of elite ‘semi- archaic belief in a creator ‘semi-god’ architect and the gods’. It is a human faculty that involves cognitive processes one in the ‘creative star’ architect of our time? In both – visual thinking and visual analogy a very important cases, the traditional religious and the current secular, component of these processes – mobilizing memory, experi- creativity was perceived as something arcane, beyond ence, and rules derived out of practice, recruiting, and rational scrutiny, demanding veneration by the public and recombining precedent cases, reinterpreting and reusing denying public inquiry and analysis. Accordingly, a popular previous findings. Last but not least analyzing the con- contemporary view, expressed even in Hollywood films, has straints, potentials, and unique characteristics of a given it that to enable creativity be expressed, the creator, being situation, matching them to knowledge constructed in time. any producer of the human-made world including the Our own research on creative design and the role of architect, has to be ‘free’. Any restriction, any outside precedents using archival material investigated two cases of interference with the creative impulses of the designer most important designers in history: Leonardo da Vinci and results in obstruction and destruction of the birth of the his invention of the triangular bastion, possibly, the most new. Corollary of this view is that the educator of archi- significant innovation in military architecture. Leonardo tecture has to liberate the student from outside or self- made extensive use of precedent theories of vision and imposed shackles, unleash his creative force of inspiration methods of shadow drawing which he recombined into a to express itself. Thus the student who succeeds to demon- new system of representation of ballistic orbits optimizing strate his ‘freedom’, that is the one who without any set defenses. Ironically, while Leonardo constructed a new objective to satisfy produces forms, several times computer method to confront a new problem by relying on empirical generated, that appear new, uninhibited, and arcane, is the evidence and by analogy to preexisting theories bringing one rewarded and not the one who responded, perhaps together different domains of knowledge, he was been very tediously, cautiously, and silently, to real conditions, wants, often referred to in popular writings as an emblematic and aspirations of a given context and region. designer-semi-god making new things out of nothing. Why this archaic way of thinking continues to exist in our “Tzonis, Alexander, co-author L. Lefaivre, “Il bastione time within a very different way of life, a different society comme mentalità”, La Città el mura, C. de Seta and J. Le and economy, and a different kind of architecture? Why Goff, (Eds.), Rome, 1989. present architectural journalism and architectural educa- Tzonis, Alexander, ‘Lines of Vision, Lines of Fire. The Role tion has so often adopted this anachronistic worship of of Analogy and Image Cognition in Designing the Renaissance creativity as ‘making something out of nothing’, while not Bastion’. Das Bauwerk und die Stadt. W. Boehm, (Ed.), only snubbing historical, anthropological, and sociological Vienna, 1994” studies that ‘deconstructed’ such arcane views about crea- Another celebrated case we investigated is that of Le tivity but also overlooking recent cognitive science research Corbusier, the most important ‘creative mind’ in architecture on human creativity?