I KNOW - I AM NOT NECESSARILY
AWARE
Several years ago
I was invited to a meeting with Swiss architect Mario Botta,
when he presented the Cymbalista
Center located at Tel Aviv University. Botta,
who was very proud of one of the more aesthetic buildings on campus, explained
that the "functional" building contains a synagogue on one side, and
a secular cultural center on the other. When I asked him how a symmetrical
building can inhabit two functions opposing in nature,
he looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Do you know what a true sign
of love is?" Influenced by my basic animalist instincts, I thought,
"Unexplainable sexual attraction", while Botta continued, "It is losing the ability to
criticize, my friend. I am simply in love with my building".
The meeting occurred five years
ago, yet ever since I have been bothered with the
question:
if Botta knows, why wasn’t Botta
aware?
I have
no doubt that Mario Botta, whose buildings adorn many
sites worldwide, knows what makes good architecture. However, the Cymbalista
Center, functionally
considered one of the worst buildings on campus, indicates that the architects
ability to distinguish between the crucial and the marginal was somewhat
faulty. It seems as if the
key question lies in the difference between knowledge and
awareness.
The theory of knowledge
(epistemology) has always been a central branch of philosophy. Rational
approaches, such as Platos or Descartes, contended
that the source of knowledge is in our internal reality, waiting only to be
unveiled through learning. However, the inherent skepticism of philosophy has
eventually rejected this assumption, stating that Platos knowledge expresses
only his cerebral reality (fantasy), and as such cannot say much about the
external world.
Karl Popper in his book
“Objective Knowledge”, describes a different flow
chart, whereby the revelation of the ‘unknown’ occurs mainly in the external
world. While both disciplines relate to a process of revelation, i.e. transferring contents from the ‘unknown’ to the ‘known’, the
state of knowing is interpreted differently by Plato and Popper. While
the latter speaks of ‘knowledge’, the first dealt with ‘awareness’. The
essential difference between the two has to do with understanding the mental
processes that distinguish ones ‘self’ from another, or in psychological terms
- the process of individuation.
Critical to the creation of
identity, differentiation reflects a change from the ‘general’ and ‘similar’,
to the ‘different’ and ‘unique’. Differentiation entails transferring content
from the depth of the unconscious psyche - desires, forgotten and repressed
events - into the conscious ‘I’. As such it characterizes
every stage in our development, starting from the determination of gender, the
first stages of infancy in the development of object relations (Klein), the
first stages of childhood when the baby becomes aware of his self as
separated from his mother (Stern), the appearance of language, inter-personal
classification (Mahler, Winnicott) and retreat to the
general in late mature stages (Bloss).
Bearing in mind that the focus of
this discussion is, after all, architecture, I would like to introduce two
common psychic processes which might better describe inability
to differentiate between contents that stem from the inner psyche of the
creator, and those that come from the external world. The first is the
rationalization of emotions, the second - emotionalization
of the ratio.
The first is an attempt to
explain emotions in order to provide the ego with a reasonable justification
for unreasonable behavior. The second deals with justifying thoughts or actions in a
manner acceptable to the ego. Both processes are outcomes of our defense
mechanisms (located, according to Freud, between the un-conscious and
conscious), which operate automatically, and therefore do not pass through
controlling filters. Both cases can be described as
disruption, or lack of a sufficient degree of differentiation, thereby
preventing us from making the right balance between knowing and being aware.
A tangible example of such
unbalanced professional consciousness is often witnessed at architecture
schools where talented students use different variations of the cliche "It was important to me!" as a
“legitimate” explanation of their projects: "It was important to me to
make a round building"; "... to use glass"; "... to build
something reminiscent of my childhood." etc.. An
inexperienced tutor would ignore such emotional references; an experienced one
would accept it, yet instruct the student to provide a rational explanation as
well; and a veteran tutor would reject the emotional claim, requesting the
student to support it with "objective" reasoning - something beyond
the inner subconscious reality - such as climate, context, function etc..
Subjective expression of the
creators psyche is, undoubtedly, a legitimate source of creation, in
architecture as in any other art form. Moreover, because the obstruction of
imagination is caused by the intellect (as a defensive measure, according to Freud)
one should expect breakthroughs to occur in this zone rather than in the
rational one. However,
because architecture also serves a purpose that stems from the external world,
a balanced professional consciousness requires also objective knowledge. This
is precisely why the architect must have a high degree of differentiation in
order to balance between the two sources of inspirations.
A tangible example of an
unbalanced architecture code is Modern architecture, which made every effort to
use rational thought in order to obliterate emotional expression considered
superfluous at the time. It is interesting to note, however, that this “rational”
code is remembered today by the works of
architects who allowed "emotional" interpretations - Le Corbusier,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der
Rohe, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson - all characterized
by complex and rebellious personalities,
some of whom denied the need for formal architecture education.
The failure of the rational code can be attributed to the resulting "boring" and
"inhumane" architecture that needed embellishment, such as the Art
Deco style. However, the fact remains that at the end of the process, most
architects (and artists) realized they should search for more
"emotional" alternatives, subsequently found in the Post Modern code.
Despite the many mistakes made
during the Post Modern era, it is worth stressing the fact that it gave
architects legitimacy to express the different and the unique. However, here
again, many architects lacked sufficient ability to differentiate between the
function and its emotional expressions - meaninglessly imitating forms that had
been meaningful to the original architects (Frank Ghery,
Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves), but meant nothing in
the new context. Thus, a low degree of differentiation caused the duplication
of the "pulp", rather than the
"fruit", squandering in vain this liberating code.
Since the world of thoughts, and
particularly the world of architecture, is inherently a subjective realm, even
when based on objective intentions, the distinction between awareness and
knowledge is not absolute. In other words, things we believe ourselves to be
aware of, or know, are not necessarily true. And this
rule applies, of course, to the subjects discussed above.
Without taking any critical
stance, the projects presented below exhibit different levels of consciousness
used in the planning process, i.e. they exhibit different balances of inner
awareness of the exterior world. The first - several spaces designed mainly by
intuition; the second - a hair salon, and a renovated interior of a private
home, which illustrate a process of rationalizing emotions; and the third - a
renovated house in Jaffa which illustrates an emotionalization of the planning process.
