- Variation is important, but not variation that negates everything else. The Pompidou Center in Paris is an example of this.
- Harmony is important, but not harmony to the point of boredom. An example of a harmonious but boring architectural creation is the Levittown type suburban housing development in the United States.
In this chapter I elaborate those ideas, contrasting them with traditional canonical criteria, and offer some additional criteria in an effort to capture this fundamental idea: that architectural design must strive to make architectural projects work in context, given their functions. In short, I will develop a design objective called “Common Sense Design”, based in part on some of the suggestions William James makes in his 1907 Lectures on Pragmatism. In part this involves developing the idea that certain designs have managed to survive relative to the domain in which they were developed and that we should learn from them. This is an argument against universalist principles of design, focusing on not just the locality of the site, but, rather, on the insights we can glean from the indigenous culture. As an example I will end by considering the Michael Graves complex in The Hague, which, from a distance, is a success, but, in context and in impact, appears, on one interpretation, to be a failure. Seen in another light, Graves’ complex can be favorably compared to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.
J. C. Pitt, Virginia Tech
First, why the emphasis on architectural design? Or, more bluntly, what does architectural design have to do with the philosophy of technology?
To speak of living in a technological society is to speak of a society in which human activity seamlessly engages artifacts of one kind or another, from computers to houses to shuttles to legal systems, etc., in the processes of living and seeking a better life. Those artifacts are designed. Sometimes they are designed for one purpose and used for another, but they remain designed. Thus, at the heart of the concept of an artifact is the concept of design. And since the philosophy of technology is concerned in many ways with artifacts, many questions about architectural design can be seen to fall within its purview.
Put simply, architects design spaces as well as the constructional systems that enclose and mediate them. These are spaces that we use for living, working, recreation, etc. Sometimes they contribute significantly to achieving the goals we seek to accomplish in those spaces and sometimes they do not. Therefore, before we design the space we ought to have some criteria to guide our design. We need such criteria to maximize the probability that we will succeed in accomplishing the goal of creating a space that contributes positively to the activity for which that space was designed. These criteria should serve two purposes:
1. they should guide design, and
2. they should be the criteria by which we judge the success of the design.
To say this is not to commit to a vicious circle, i.e., we judge the finished product in terms of whether it meets the criteria we used to design it. It is more complicated than that because in the time line from initial concept to a design to finished product it is quite possible, in fact, I would argue, almost inevitable that the meanings of some or all of the criteria undergo subtle but important changes. That is, we may think we know what we mean by harmonious when we start the design process, but when we look at the finished space, it may not have turned out to be harmonious, in which case either we did not know what we meant by the concept when we began, or the concept of harmony we employ in evaluating the end space has changed from when we started and we now have two different interpretations of the same word. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but my explanation is that when we think of a concept like Harmony, given that it is part of our criteria for a successful space, we jump to the conclusion that as a criterion it must be universal and fixed in its meaning, when in fact there are no such fixed meanings.126 To take this one step farther, I am willing to defend the view that in each application of, for example, the concept of harmony, we add to or subtract from what we thought we meant when we started the design process. Meanings change in application, or to put it in Peircean terms, meanings change when reality pushes against language.
Basically James’ account of common sense claims that the categories of common sense thinking are historically contingent, certain categories emerge because employing them in that context at that time increase survivability and success, however defined (James 1907; 1981). What may be an example of something or other in one context may not be in another.
Consider the following story, a real life example. I had asked some friends from the university if they wanted to help my wife and I load hay bales that were out in the field onto a truck and then unload them into our barn, they, all Ph.D.s, agreed and thought this would great fun. The hay field in question is on a hill and reasonably steep and visible from the road that winds down into the valley below. While we were near the top of the hill I saw the pick-up truck of an old framer who lived down the valley stop and turn around and make its torturous way up the mountainside to where we were. My wife was driving the hay bale truck, she grew up on a farm but it was in the flatlands. I was up on the truck stacking the bales as they were tossed up onto the truck bed. The old farmer, Dan, got out of his pickup and stared at us and just shook his head. “How many Ph.D.s involved in this operation?” He asked. I replied there were six of us. He snorted and then he asked “Any of you ever heard of gravity?” and then he laughed and laughed, got in his truck and started back home continuing to shake his head. It seems we had the truck pointed uphill -and the guys tossing bales had to throw them uphill against the pull of gravity. It was much easier to throw them downhill onto the truck bed, getting an assist from gravity. He knew that instinctively, well, he grew up riding along side his daddy from the time he could walk, absorbing so much of the common sense knowledge of how to get things done on a farm that it seemed like instinct.
This is the sort of thing that James means by common sense. Through a variety of means, some ways of doing things in a certain place for a certain purpose come to be common sense as they share acceptance in the community that does not require justification, they have been vindicated over time. Yet, the old French saying, Plus le change, plus le meme chose, is false. Consider the same scene twenty years later. The hay field has been sold and the new owner no long makes the small “square bails” of hay, but he still makes hay. However, now he makes hay in huge round bails. In order to get them down off the hillside he has to transport them one at a time on a spike on the back of his tractor, and to load one of the round bails on a spike on a hill you have back the tractor uphill, spike end pointing up so you can impale the bail and then move down the hill without it falling off. The use of gravity has changed. Now hold that thought while I move to canonical standards for architecture design.
When it comes to design, there is a canon in architecture, at least there was.
The architectural canonical criteria come to us from the Roman architect, Vitruvius. The three criteria he laid down were, Utilitas, Firmitas, and Venustas.
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This analysis is firmly related to Goodman’s (1955) new problem of induction and his concept of projection.