Braden Engel: Architectural Theory, The Aesthetic Experience, & Visual Conditioning | atlas*029

[Music] what is an architectural theorist uh an architectural theorist I guess is anybody who tries to better explain all the things that we can't see when we look at architecture does that make sense yeah does that have a lot to do with sort of you know you hear musicians talk about how when you understand music theory you sort of know what's going on let's say in Cal patterns in The Melody of a song so you know if you're a musician you have much more context as to sort of like the the melodics and the instrumentation of whenever you hear music and it may offer you more insight into you know what makes excellent music so excellent versus a person who may not have an understanding of Music Theory just sort of hearing whatever sounds cohesive as being like music and not really being able to differentiate you know the excellent music from what we would regard as not not so excellent is that sort of like a congruent example yeah I think it's similar to that you know there's there's a lot of parallels or a lot of analogies between the the Art and Design of architecture and and other fields of Art and Design like music there's a famous quote that architecture is like Frozen music which has been used and overused a lot uh throughout the throughout time but you know both both music and architecture have forms of notation of of representation before they're performed right so like you said music theory when a composer puts notes onto a page that's then instructions for performers to bring into reality right to play and Architects do a similar thing they design right like I think too often the general public probably doesn't realize that even though Architects get their names credited for buildings that get built you know there's the Guggenheim in New York by Frank lyd Wright right uh Architects don't build like free Floyd Wright didn't build the the gugan what Architects do is they design it they draw things and then those drawings go to somebody else to build it so I mean that that's one way that uh architecture Theory could operate in relation to to music theory is to to explain to people that don't know how to read the music in other words you know what's going on in a building by looking at what the architect actually did with their hands since they didn't build the structure what did they design that's one one way to look at yeah and as far as comparing the design of an architect versus the finished product how similar do those sort of end up being and maybe what what what are the mechanisms through which an architect sort of make sure that the actual construction of their design reflects what they were seeking out to design in the first place right this this is a this is a massive uh issue in architecture in general but it's become a topic of of study and scholarship over the last few decades as well which is how how do we ensure that what is represented on on a set of drawn instructions is exactly what is then built in reality and there was a very good historian and theorist named Robin Evans um who was working out of England in the 80s and in the 90s and he wrote a very good essay called translations from drawing to building which which address just that and what we realize is like just like translating any language to another language there's always things lost in the translation um but it's so unpredictable that sometimes things are gained in the translation as well things that are unexpected that maybe are fortuitous um serendipitous in some ways so you you can never be truly you can never guarantee exactly what will happen because typical sets of drawings are done in what's called orthographic geometry so like a floor plan drawing looks straight down into a building's Foundation right and and a section drawing is like an imaginary slice vertically through a building so you can see all the different floors and there's axonometric and now 3D 3D systems allow us to do different kinds of modeling as well but the way that actual joints come together when somebody's building something can mean that things have to happen a little bit different on the ground than the way they were imagined in in the design process so all of that I mean all of that sort of when it when it builds and accumulates means that the architect can never really guarantee that the intention will be or will equate to the outcome um and I don't just mean that in like the the physical product I mean that also in terms of their let's call it like um the more subjective thing things that they're intending like how one would experience something how would feel uh you know what what it's meant to express that intention can't always be guaranteed in the in the outcome and part of it's because of the translation of what's designed or what's drawn to what happens in in concrete reality yeah and I think a lot of this relates to modes of presentation in architecture right I'd love if you could sort of break down to the audience what modes of presentation means in architectural context and why they're so important well I guess it it depends on whether we're talking about uh presentation or representation because these are these are difficult words in some ways I mean the term representation gets used a lot because I mean if we just break it down the the idea is that that the architect or the author the designer uh has an idea right in one's mind and then represents that in a drawing right which is a weird way to think of it because usually when we draw something that we're looking at like a still life then artist paints for example you're you are representing it in a way because it's already present but how can you represent something that's not present right if it's hypothetical if it has yet to exist so pre presentation the word you use is probably the more accurate accurate word because we're presenting it into the world for the first time um but that's a weird word in like architectural education too because students learn how to present their projects which is a very big thing as well having to verbalize and articulate what you're doing in a project so so which which are we talking about are we talking about the way Architects present their work or like visual modes of of presentation uh I'm talking much more about a visual modes of presentation I'm also curious you know I'm not sure what exactly is considered the predominant software Architects used to present their ideas but you know I had an engineering class in high school and we used this like AutoCAD software and I remember you know building out sort of like a floor plan and a house with like fences yep and I would imagine it's much more difficult to present an idea rather than represent one because you're going off of information that's much more lower resolution right if you can see a building materially there's a lot more information for you to go by representing it but to present something that's really abstract and sort of lodged in your brain um I'd imagine it's really difficult right it's uh it's it's depending on what on what you're trying to do it can be really easy it can be very intuitive but it can also be very difficult the difficulty comes in trying to communicate the idea to somebody else and that that's an issue whether you're you're writing an essay or whether you're trying to show an idea of a built thing a physical 3D thing that we experience in the fourth dimension of time as well to somebody else because it might make sense to you but how the heck do you let somebody else into that and that's the difficulty so I think different designers do it in different ways what are some of the main modes of presentation that's what you're asking right so you know early 20th Cent Cy mid 20th century it was Architects hunched over the table with their t-square and their their parallel board and they're drawing by hand right and sometimes there'll be physical models built as well so then we get the we get computers we get the digital Revolution and like you said AutoCat was very popular for for a long time which was good at at plan sections elevations orthographic type of presentations um and then 3D modeling so like when I was in university we used AutoCAD uh and we used what was popular then form Z was a popular one this was like 3D modeling something you could rotate it move it around you could even use a robotic pen or arm and if you had built a physical model out of cardboard or paper whatever you could tap the model in like all of its corners and all of its points and it would then map that digitally for you w to keep designing it but then after form Z kind of went out of style what's popular today Rhino is popular um grasshopper is another form of like algorithmic scripting for design I mean I know this because I know that students use these things I don't even use these things very much because I'm more of a historian and theorist uh but I know that I know that architectural presentation while it uh tends to think it's always on The Cutting Edge is usually quite a ways behind they're always pulling from like engineering fields or more recently like film animation like whatever Pixar is using or Disney Studios is using Architects want to get that stuff to see how they can model buildings in similar ways yeah um but this is all to say that there is always been uh a bit of friction between let's call it like the abstract digital space of what's on a computer screen on a monitor and what I'm doing let's say by analog with my hands whether it's drawing or building a the physical materials and there's Arguments for both about what both can do and cannot do um but I think largely people in the architectural field and discipline would would probably say they don't want that hand stuff to ever completely go on of style because of how important how important it is yeah when all of us write I think using precisely the words that describe what we're looking to communicate is what makes our writing articulate right and when creating modes of presentation and architecture what are the mechanisms through which an architect ensures their depiction of their idea is precise and articulate are these maybe footnotes under designs and they're sort of describing what they want the viewer to feel when they're inside um it's just maybe providing sort of like mood boards or idea boards other pieces of architecture that sort of relate the sort of experience they want viewers to to to experience being in the building what are the mechanisms through which sort of artists and Architects get really granular about what they want the piece of architecture to look like and feel well I'll start by saying I'm not a licensed architect so I don't do this often yeah but you know I've I've taught an architecture and Art and Design schools for a long time so I know how it works my wife is a licensed architect so I get to see the stuff that she does um but you know the actual like drawn instructions that Architects produce that go to the contractors to build have to be so Cal calculated and so precise that they have all the things you're talking about in terms of like different scales of drawing so you know a whole building floor plan but also individual rooms individual walls uh drawn with all the dimensions and all the fixtures and then there will be annotations as well so descriptive text with a little call out as it's called like an arrow or a bubble around a certain thing and text saying this needs to be fixed in this way with this material this sizing Etc the idea is there's no questions at all for the contractor when they see these drawn instructions they know exactly what to do but that's in the last phase of a project as far as the designer is concerned the early stuff that you're kind of getting at conceptual design schematic design the really early stuff has to do more like it looks more like cartooning graphic novels storyboarding very abstract expressive sketching usually and Abstract model building um try to get the idea out of your head into three-dimensional reality to see what it looks like and it's very iterative it's very it's very like do 10 of them not one of them do a hundred of them to see which ones are getting closer to what my idea wants to be what the client needs it to be all that kind of stuff it's it's a really fun process in that way yeah I want to continue exploring sort of the historical implications of the digital Revolution when we look back at the works of architecture of past when there was no computers none of these sort of like softwares um that Architects use nowadays how much of an unlock should we think of the digital Revolution being in sort of the field of architecture and H how should that make us feel about just how much more difficult and sort of impressive works of architecture of past are okay well the way it's talked about today has largely to do with pros and cons or let's say advantages and disadvantages I mean since the digital Revolution the the general slogan I guess for a lot of digital design Technologies has been probably more with regard to form than function if we just take those two f-words that are always in every design conversation Form and Function and the idea is that the digital design softwares allow us to allow us to design and then give give instructions for Builders how to make more complex forms than we could have possibly imagined or represented before the digital Revolution if I Mak sense um you know you think about what you're actually able to draw in a sheet of paper versus what you're able to to make in a digital abstract space on the screen so a lot of Architects have gone all the way down that road to try to see how complex forms can be you know to the point that the floor becomes the wall becomes the ceiling becomes the outside of the wall like it's called smooth surfaces folded surfaces and that is borrowed some from French philosophy on on these sorts of things as well and so that could be pretty exciting in terms of new forms because we get to see buildings look way different than they looked in the past um but what you're asking is maybe then do we have more of an appreciation for some historical architecture because they didn't have presentation like that yeah you know we look at a lot of ancient civilizations and we see the huge amount of like stones heavy stones that they' move right and to us we think of that as being um sort of like worthy of even more feelings of impression of that because it's like now we have Modern Machinery so if we wanted to move something heavy it's a lot easier for us to move something heavy and have that sort of influence what we design and what we think is possible but to think that in past civilizations without that Modern Machinery they were able to move big rocks in still include a lot of uh maybe ideas that now are seen as pretty um practical to to pursue and back then we would think of as being impractical that's sort of like a cause for um our impression of those um sort of like buildings and architectures yeah I think so I mean I think that's how a lot of people see it there there was a concern you know thousands of years ago for buildings to last as long as they possibly could which is just not something that we do today buildings that are erected today are meant to last 50 years 60 years it's a weird thing to think of in that way but our culture changes so rapidly that the our needs our spatial needs which Architects call program how do you program a building or a space in accordance with the way people want to use it or we'll use it the way we use spaces changes I would say faster now than it did thousands of years ago so we need to rebuild buildings constantly and take them down and rebuild them or reuse old ones whereas if you take something like the Parthenon on top of the Acropolis in Athens you know built marble last has lasted a a really long time it's had to be rebuilt because of it's exploded when it was used as an Arsenal by the Ottomans it's like had several lives but that thing is meant to stand forever right I mean yeah I mean infinitely and so there's there's not this idea of well we're making the building for cheap you know for a cheap budget right now knowing that it will have to be rebuilt in a century or half a century this needs to last forever so yeah we can feel that we can sense that in a way if you visit some of these ancient structures and I think you're right that more meaning is put into them as well for that reason because when you build a structure that is meant to last not just for a few Generations but for all of all generations forward into time then the building actually becomes a sort of Monument or Memorial to who you are at your present and I don't I don't know that Architects necessarily see the buildings that we erect today in that way right so a lot more symbolism is is embedded and and put into the projects or buildings that we see from thousands of years ago and we just don't have that kind of visual symbolism on buildings anymore in the in the wake of modernity and sort of stripping ornament off buildings and making them more abstract geometries you brought up something that I found super interesting and you know one of the topics I wanted to cover with you was sustainability and historical context and you brought up how how you know in the past a lot of Architects they wanted to design something that lasted for a really long time and now there's a sort of uh approach where Architects are um sourced and contractors sort of design buildings that are meant to last 50 to 100 years because of how fast our culture changes I'm curious if you could speak to sustainability in sort of like historical context is there president for Architects to um have a primary focus of their designs be sustainability and how is that sort of evolved and why is it now that a lot of Architects sort of focus on making buildings that only last half a century or a century well first let's let's say this let's make the distinction between uh Architects and the word architect the way we use it today and Builders of the past so like architect with the capital A the professional architect has only existed for about 500 years maybe 550 years brunoli filipo breski becomes like the main lead designer and administrator of the project to put the Dome on top of Santa Maria Del Fior in Florence the Duomo and Florence that big dome project in effect makes him the first professional architect one who does drawings that others build and he's in charge of the whole construction of that site and so since then the profession of the architect has developed to the point that now it's part of like to think of itself as one of like the big three professions with law medicine and architecture in so far as you have to get a certain kind of degree you have to take a series of exams and then you get a license to call yourself an architect like there's this big legal thing you can't actually call yourself an architect if you're not licensed so I just I only say that because I I think that maybe there's probably a lot of the general public that doesn't realize that whoever built the pantheon in Rome wasn't an architect not the same way we use the term today um there are builders doing things according to certain geometries and use of materials and things like that so how did the Builders of the past work in terms of sustainability they didn't have that word in their vocabulary in the first place right I mean that word is is is so popular today that it's almost getting greenwashed out right sustainability is used in so many contexts to try to lead us to think that it's already something we ought to do um that it's it's probably used it saturates you know a lot of marketing is what I guess what I'm giving you um but that word comes out of environmental thinking largely that developed in like the 1970s late 1960s as well the word as we know it today so leers a thousand or 2,000 or 3,000 years ago had they didn't have the word but they were already doing it because everything they did had to be sustainable in the first place it was it was an inherent requisite of the project uh just as much as it needing to be structural needing to stand up and you need to be useful and that's that's the separation from the past and today like today yeah our buildings have to stand up they have to be useful they should probably look nice and then there's half The Architects out there who think yes it should be sustainable as well it's like this additional thing that we have to put in to the project when it in reality it should be as inherent and as essential as it needs to be useful and it needs to stand up so like what's a good example I sent you an an image of um it's a home in Tunisia it's the one that's like circular carved into the Earth yeah it's called a trog home uh trite means like cave dwellers so that can be a derogatory term but over there they call them trite homes uh because some of the indigenous peoples there in Tunisia have carved down into the Earth in a cylinder and then their main rooms break off of the bottom of that cylinder into the Earth so that that cylindrical sort of hole becomes the courtyard like a sort of social or public place for the family it's the most well lit by the Sun and then the the rooms the kitchen and the bedrooms break off from there and they're entirely shaded in the earth okay so that that area of Tunisia which is a fascinating country by the way it has like at least different three ecosystems and geological terrains it's so cool but where the where the chocolite homes are it's really hot but it's it's a desert climate it's really dry so it gets super cold at night too right so it makes sense to to have this hole in the earth that takes all of the sun's energy during the day right it also lights up the spaces because they paint it sort of white at the bottom as well reflects light so naturally lit during the day and then it it collects all that energy from energy from the Sun and at night the Earth naturally releases that heat into the rooms and it's it's a perfectly suitable temperature for sleeping and that this is a form of creating a dwelling for oneself that requires no building up from the earth there's nothing built that needs to resist gravity and that's typically how we think of architecture today is having to build up from the earth and resist gravity when in effect you can look at a site you can look at the Earth and say there's there's already a dwelling there I just have to remove it's like a it's a form of sculpture it's subtractive instead of additive and I think that's a pretty powerful thing especially if you can use the Earth that you took out to make something else maybe um so you know that that's an example I think of a a perfectly suitable and appropriate place to live whose form and whose shape already has woven into it what we would call sustainable design strategies today yeah it's almost like the ultimate sustainable design is to just go under the Earth because you're not using additional materials and sort of orienting them in some way maybe maybe you know I mean there's different ways of looking at that I guess but it it it Works in many ways it's it uses energy from the Sun it uses light from the sun the courtyard allows us allows any hot air to escape by rising up and out of the courtyard and then cool air for the Shaded Earth replaces it you get a sort of natural ventilation going as well as air passes over the top of the hole um there's a plenty of examples from I guess you'd call it pre-industrial architecture that that do all of that very well that you know Architects are getting more interested in now and I think architecture schools are getting more interested in as well teaching students these things so that we can use them with our modern Technologies tonight yeah I wanted to ask you about cross-cultural architectural influences and I'm curious if maybe sort of designs like these that you just mentioned um are now making it so that you know with the world becoming more globalized everyone having uh more uh access to each other and a lot of work being much more interdisciplinary is is sort of like cross-cultural collaboration in architecture becoming more and more of a prominent thing than it of past it's a difficult one it's it's one of the two or three hottest topics that I see with like uh with architecture students anyway today is this effect of globalization and how how structures are being built all over the world that are stripped of any any let's say symbolis or or a form of visual connection to the culture at that place in that geography of that site and you know again you could split it pre-industrial and POS industrial it used to be that buildings had a lot of meaning tied to them and the place and the culture of where they were and you can look at any glass skyscraper in any large city anywhere in the globe now and you can take that glass skyscraper pick it up and put it in any other city and you know what's the consequence doesn't doesn't make much of a difference does it and so people are struggling a lot with that now they think that buildings still need to find a way to to connect to local culture but then one has to ask isn't local culture changing as well with globalization right uh I'm trying to think of a way to to respond to what you're referring to as cross-cultural influence I mean there are Architects with certain cultural backgrounds that are doing buildings all over the world and that's a way of crosscult influence as supp um I guess the way I I think about it is in the past when traveling to different parts of the country and commuting communicating with people across the globe wasn't practical or feasible you know you'd grow up in one location you obviously familiarize yourself with the local architecture that in turn was a part of the culture of the city and that sort of constrained let's say you and how um unique and Divergent and sort of innovative your architecture can be because you've never seen the kinds of architecture in places across the globe right and now if you're architecture student you have access to the internet you have access to making phone calls across the globe having Zoom chats uh going on Discord speaking with people directly and I'd imagine that makes it so that architecture around the world it's almost as if um the what's drawing a lot of Architects uh in there sort of like design choices is this amalgamation of this library of architectural knowledge that in the past was sort of constraints of where you were geographically located if that makes any sense yeah I'm with you I'm with you I think yeah so what we have what Young what Young designers have at their fingertips now in terms of looking pulling anything up on your phone and seeing buildings anywhere right being able to theoretically have access to more knowledge more information doesn't necessarily equate to being able to let's say uh understand or be able to we weave some of that information into your own design work um just because we can see a building in India on Instagram doesn't mean that we're going to understand why why that was made there by whom and what material for for what reasons beyond what we see and so I guess this this is partly what I said at the beginning about how to define theory or a theorist in in making the invisible visible to us I mean there's plenty to see in a building but there's also a lot going on that we can't see and that's where Theory helps to like open things up and explain things to us so like I'm I'm a big atmology guy I love breaking down like the structure of how words are made and the history of the way that they've been used and just just the word Theory comes from the Greek word theore and it can be broken into two parts so that the the Thea part is sort of like what gives us the word theater uh Thea is like being able to see something or something uh something we look at like in a theater okay and then the second part is from a word called hero which means uh something made visible to you so that you can look at it very closely and attentively so so the construction of the word theory means a setting in which we are allowed to closely and incisively see something so as to understand it better than just sort of glancing at it if you think of it that way um which is interesting because you know that that comes with all sorts of metaphors in Western philosophical and intellectual thought that come with Enlightenment right the idea that something that was once dark now that we put light on it is knowledgeable or is open to us knowing it um whole universities have Latin phrases isn't it UC see Berkeley that has Fiat Lux as their slogo um as as their slogan I mean so Enlightenment seeing something by by lighting it up in the very beginning of gen genis right all there is is darkness and what's the first thing that God does let there be light you know so that all these metaphors come with seeing as a as a way of knowing so what am I getting at just because we can look at things on the Internet or go on like Google Earth and take one of their tours and see pictures of something it's great it's a good way to expose yourself to something I mean it's like in a way it's like going to a museum and seeing things artifacts from another culture it's how we learn about other cultures largely uh but I don't think anything can replace like going there and experiencing it with all of your senses in person and I me I'm probably getting ahead of myself here because I know what your final question is maybe I'll save it for your for your final question your concluding question but part of part of what I'm getting at is like in order for there truly to be crosscultural influence um there needs to be cross Global Travel I guess you could say visitation visiting places because I think the more popular this gets uh the more young adults feel they've seen or gone somewhere because they see it on a phone or on a screen when in fact you need to get out of the house and go to that place and visit it because that's ultimately what changes your perspective and allows you to then empathize with groups of people that are different than the way you were brought up I think you make a great point and just to sort of build off of your point I think it's also important to sort of like integrate humility in how you approach other cultures and also curiosity you know because just because you travel somewhere and see something um if you're not asking questions and if you're not opening yourself up to learning more about the way of life of the people who sort of like built the structure there's a lot of information you're sort of leaving on the table that would enrich your understanding of a lot of the things that we can't really see and you know I heard you say in the beginning something that I found really interesting you said you know there's a lot of things we can't see in architecture and that's where Theory sort of AIDS um our pursuit of understanding and I'm curious would you say that a lot of the things we can't see are things we can feel and I want to sort of relate this to sort of aesthetic experience in architecture what how would you sort of Define aesthetic experience and and sort of relate that to you know when you see a building there's things you can't really see but are there things that we can feel are there maybe things that we can cannot feel without having sort of an understanding and context surrounding the the the structure we're looking at absolutely it's a it's a good question one um I I think that what we do is you would tie to well let's start with Aesthetics okay Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with uh the definition of beauty and how we sense Beauty but when when the word aesthetic is used it's generally just meant to refer to the outward appearance of something the way something formally appears to our to our vision so yes uh part of what theory does is it helps to explain the things that we don't just see but can be felt and that's part of aesthetic experience absolutely I mean if you if we just just back up one second say that there are two different ways that theory operates that might help the discussion too one way that theory operates is what I would call instrumental which is sort of like I have a theory for something now I'm going to try to like execute it bring it into effect almost like a strategy um and architecture theory has operated that way in the past but I think that the the way that we're talking about it today or the way I like to discuss it is rather than instrumental uh theory is like a kind of mediation so that it comes between like buildings what might be called architectural facts and all of the subtexts and contexts uh out of which that building or that fact came so it like gets in the middle opens it up and it g it gives us a sort of vocabulary like almost like an arsenal of weapons to attack something and then it helps us explain and articulate what's going on there that may not have been visible at First Sight that's that comes that definition comes from a theorist Michael Hayes uh the this idea of mediation between architectural facts and these historical and social subtexts okay so aesthetic experience is all of your senses right and it's debated just how many senses we have actually when Architects talk or when theorists talk about this stuff because we're all used to five but there are some theorists who think there's like a sixth or a seventh as well which doesn't have to do with like seeing ghosts but uh the six is like sometimes called uh a skeletal sense and I like to think of it when I teach I call it structural empathy so empathy means being able to experience what something else is experiencing right so structural empathy if we think of buildings as analogous to our bodies right think of a building as as a body which it is it has skin or they call it an envelope it has skin it has structure just like our skeleton it has circulation it has air flow it has different organs and support systems the that the parallels abound between the anatomy of us and the anatomy of buildings and the theory of this like sixth kind of sense is that when you see a structure that exhibits it's when when you see a building that exhibits its structure that expresses how it's standing up because our body is also struggling to Stand Up Against Gravity we sense it we we empathize with it and it's not at a conscious level it's like a subconscious sort of thing but you can you can feel the compression of like stones on top of stones or you can feel the tension of like a a tensile rod on a bridge or something like that a cable because our tendons act in tension and our bones and muscles acting compression tension all the time so some theorists think that that's one way of like augmenting or deepening one's aesthetic experience of a building to have it express that that structural empathy in some way and then the other senses are part of it too like you can smell you can taste certain materials certain environments but depending on their humidity sometimes as well the color and sight how things feel and you know I think people forget that aesthetic experience happens in four dimensions and not just three so we don't stand in front of buildings and and uh observe them like a painting in a gallery we move through them and around them in time right not just space but also time so that so that walking up a staircase or walking up a ramp takes more time because we're going up and our legs sense that it's hard and because it takes longer it increases our anticipation for what will come at the top of that ramp or that stairway and that that's all part of the aesthetic experience and the discovery of what the next space might be um so all of all of those kind of aesthetic Dimensions absolutely make their way into how Theory mediates and tries to explain more than just postcard image if if you know what I mean or Instagram image we could call it that does that make sense yeah and to add to sort of the fourth dimension of time it is another part of or or component of what contributes to the aesthetic experience is that it's impossible for us to experience this building how we experienced it let's say 5 seconds ago right so sort of like the structure and and the actual like reality of the building is constantly evolving with us and like even in the experience let's say if we're only in a building for 10 minutes the building isn't the same exactly the same as it was 10 minutes when you first entered it versus the 10 minutes after where you exited it right absolutely absolutely it it it always changes I mean there I've always been interested in like the difference between one's ho where one's dwelling where you are every single day every season right of every year as the light changes as the as the temperatures change and like visiting a museum or something once you know what I mean because there's habitual experience where you know what to expect after a while at at one's home or one's workplace and that can lead to your enjoyment or how meaningful that experience might be for you how comfortable that process is that Rhythm and repetition whereas something like an art museum which is a big you know big opportunity for an architect to design it can it can come with like this big punch and this big surprise that can be very meaningful because you know that the majority of the people that visited are coming from somewhere else and may only see that thing once um so you're right I mean Cubist painters liked to paint over the course of like an afternoon so that the sun would go from east to west and you would see Shadows on different facets of the same buildings or the same trees at different times and so you can look at a two-dimensional painting and feel four dimensions in it and I've always thought that like the experience of a building or the built environment we'd call it it's it's doing the same thing right because it's always already in time as things change over the course of a day you visit a a building in the morning versus the night it's completely different right yeah and this idea of empathizing with the body of structures is so interesting to me I sort of related to experiences you know when we're kids and there's a snowstorm or a rainstorm and we're sensing how the our building the building we're inside of is interacting with the environment right or even when there's an earthquake a lot of how the building feels inside of it when there when an earthquake is happening has a huge impact as to how we feel it's sort of if we're anxious of the earthquake it might sort of like Drop things is the structure going to come down or is the way the building is interacting with the shaking of the earth making me feel confident and safe in that the earthquake's going to pass and I'm going to be okay right right right I mean there's all sorts of interesting engineering strategies these days to combat seismic activity especially you know especially in Japan uh anywhere there's a lot of seismic activity where there's large sky scrapers that are built I don't know how familiar you are with some of these strategies like no some of them have what are called like suspended dampeners so like if you imagine a really tall skyscraper like super tall yeah the bottom of it will be on something like large railroad tracks okay so it can like the bottom can like sway like this and then the top has this super heavy weight suspended on a bunch of cables like a necklace that you would hold in your hand right so the idea is that then that the center of your gravity is actually quite high and because when the Earth has an earthquake it you know has waves like that the bottom of the skyscraper can shift and the top stays exactly where it isting rather than like this buckling and the whole thing coming down right so you you could be at like the top of that structure during like a 5.0 or something and you might not even sense that there was movement because you're not moving up there but if you're on like the second floor you know you're going back and forth 10 feet right yeah that's so interesting because the the region of the building you're inside of is going to dictate a lot of how you feel about what's occurring right right right and you know if you visit skyscrapers that have like public viewing decks like what was formally called the Sears Tower in Chicago or some of those you can always get out to the edge and look straight down and you can see that the building is always because of wind and different movement swaying a little bit I like I think that building goes back and forth like 10 feet MH and it's always unsettling for people but it's supposed to it has to because you never want a tall structure like that to be 100% rigid then things will break and this is this is what you know traditional Japanese architecture does really well by using wood because wood you know is good because it can Flex it can move a little bit and like wooden pagodas for example um tall wood structures are pretty good at being able to sort of shift with seismic events but also with changes in the seasons with expansion and contraction of certain members whether it's hot or cold out right yeah to those of us who are unfamiliar how would you describe Continental European philosophy in the context of architecture wow that's a big that's a big question uh let's say that let's say that there's a there's a history to it um Continental philosophy became popular for some Architects and Architectural theorists to pull from at a certain time uh and I probably say that's during the postmodern cultural movement postmodernity 1968 19704 till about the end of the 20th century so what's different between Continental philosophy and and what an American philosophy which is a lot of times just called analytical philosophy um Continental philosophy referring to Continental in Europe just because Europe has so much more so many more layers of History right like way way more history historical baggage there there's a lot more thinker and a lot more ideas and Foundations intellectually that one has to confront in order to keep trying to progress a certain line of thought and America in relation is such a young country there's not nearly as much historical baggage that it lends itself to sort of like let's just do this like why why deal with all that stuff already let's just let's just go forward with what we have at hand so maybe I can come back to that when we talk a little bit more about pragmatism so Continental philosophy always has to build on like a lineage of thinkers so that's why that's why so take like jacqu Dera Dera got very popular uh towards the end of the 20th century for architecture theorists and teachers were assigning readings of dareda to architecture students in the 1980s and 90s but dareda had to perform a lot of his work work upon haiger and haiger had to form a lot of his work upon hosil and hosil had to form a lot of his work upon Kant and you can go back right kant's late 18th century um and so all of that sort of it just comes with that trail and what you tend to get out of Continental philosophy is a lot more let's say flexibility flexibility for interpretation of the text whereas in American analytical philosophy there's a very little if not zero tolerance for that possibility of interpretation of the text because American analytical philosophy wants the the the writing the philosophical writing to be absolutely clear and distinct and precise calculated and so there's no it's no coincidence that like a lot of philosophy of logic has come out of analytical philosophy in in America whereas like French philosophy D dedas philosophy uh plays with words a lot of times uses puns um almost like jokes in the writing intends for double meanings or triple meanings in the way a word or a phrase is used which is almost like a sort of weaving with poetry in a way right so that a lot of the ideas that you're getting from that from Continental philosophy may may be like really frustrating for a lot of Young Americans to read but actually it it probably opens the imagination to to interpret a wider range of topics or ideas or Curiosities than if it was really precise and calculated so part of what dared was writing about um later in his career had to do with let's say well his philosophy was is called deconstruction he took a word called construction from heiger and then turned it into deconstruction and dar us trying to take ideas and topics that we usually take for granted attitudes that we take for granted pull them apart until they almost start to see them the other way upside down reconsidering what something is and what I mean by like prevalent attitudes or topics is things as fundamental as like binaries like absence versus presence uh male female you know you you uh object void you know space space and object and he and he deconstructs the way these things have been used and thought about into such a way that no longer do we have like a black and white binary but we kind of confused about what is absence what is what is it to be not there versus what is it to be there um and this and this started to then get into geometry because anytime we're talking about space or whether something exists or not well this is what buildings do they they take up spaces and they become meaningful places and and so Architects like started a poll from Dara and other philosophers in the 70s and the 80s to try to help with their design of their buildings to be things that maybe could be open to similar kinds of interpretation and maybe make the people who interacted with the buildings a little bit more Curious or even confounded about what's going on as a way to almost joke or or disturb wake them up from the quotidian everyday cycle that we get into um so that's I think that's one thing that made Continental philosophy appealing was like it was a way for Architects to reconsider their own design process and people like Peter Eisenman as an architect who did this Bernard schumi borrowed from dareda some as well um but that's that's just one side of it I know this is a long answer but there's there two sides one is like Dara we could say deconstruction and then the other side where Architects and architecture theorists pulled from Continental philosophy is phenomenology and phenomenology comes from hoso little bit from heiger but then in the 20th century Maurice Maro ponti is his name a French philosopher and what is phenomenology what does phenomena mean it's it's the things that we experience or perceive in physical reality okay and this naturally became something that Architects wanted to read about and weave into their own work because he was talking about perception and experience and how our senses bring in how our bodies tie into other bodies like we were saying they we identify with buildings we we sense things and it can become a more meaningful and enjoyable experience so phenomenology became a popular philosophy to pull from as well in the 70s and 80s almost as a a reaction to the overly abstract sort of white Cube modernist architecture of the first half of the 20th Century which was seen to to alienate the public because it didn't say anything to us because we could not identify with it now correct me yeah and correct me if I'm wrong and I'm going to try to explain something pretty abstract so I'm going to try my best should the audience think about American philosophy as being much more focused on constructing principles that apply as generally as possible and then Continental philosophy Maybe H operating under a belief that there's a lot of information that can only be preserved and leveraged inside of ambiguity and that's why a lot of Architects when uh when being inspired by let's say Continental philosophy they also recognize the value of constructing things that are ambiguous and the kind of thinking and ideas that can arise in ambiguous let's say environments and that's sort of what they're drawing from when they're being inspired by continenal philosophy going from you know their inspiration to their actual designs of pieces of architecture uh yeah I think you're you're going in the right direction there I think you're hitting on it and ambiguity ambiguity is the key key word ambivalence ambiguity complexity um Paradox sometimes as well these things that are not black and white but rather stretch us and suspend us between two things and we're unsure I I think that I don't want to generalize what all Continental philosophy but plenty of French philosophy does that is able to able to um leverage that ambiguity like you said to kind of take advantage of that potential and and the designers that have read that and that are interested in that probably do that in their work as well Bernard schumi is one um TSI for those who who don't know the name um he's one of my favorite Architects to to study his work and to read his writings as well he's a theorist of his own um and he he sort of acknowledged that whatever I do in a design for a building it's sort of out of my hands what people are going to do in that thing after it's built and this is the intention versus outcome thing I was talking about before it was it became such a prevalent attitude in the first half of the 20th century to think that the function that I designed in that building is how people will use it done right almost like plugging Us in like something into a machine or a number in in an equation and Architects like Shi were like no I mean people are going to do whatever they want to our buildings and in our buildings they might vandalize it uh why can't people use the inside of a church as a basketball court you know he and he said things like this and wrote things like that and that's why I think his architecture is pretty exciting because finally it acknowledges that that's a post modern way of looking of looking at architecture and actually it opens up more possibilities for the way that people can experience things so he's responsible for shumi is responsible for H the park de la vet project in in Paris there's a big competition for it it's a large Park in Paris and he um he designed this grid of of like Scarlet Red Foles he calls them they're buildings that have no function they look like they might and like we we take the inference that maybe they're meant to be for something like like is it a little Cafe is at a little theater but in effect they're just little points of orientation around the park and it sort of sort of turned people's ideas about how we use space and Orient ourselves at public space upside down you had said something I think you're getting to something there yeah you had said something really interesting in your prior answer when you started it off by saying something along the lines of in Europe there's a history you sort of have to account for and in America the attitude is much more of let's just try something I'm curious if you can maybe expand on that a bit and maybe in ways that's we can view that sort of as a microcosm of like the the American attitude let's say and like the European attitude of sort of like innovating and creating building yeah yeah um what's a good example the example that I like to use usually in classes is Chicago and the birth of of the skyscraper in Chicago in the 19th century because after the Civil War in the United States uh the railroad system during and after the Civil War reaches all the way across the states there's more there's more trade going on and certain cities are getting more wealthy and in the 1870s Chicago has it its great fire right a lantern is kicked over by a cow and burns two-thirds of downtown Chicago to the ground and all of a sudden then in like 1880 you're looking at Chicago as this as this like clean slate and because there's so much wealth so much Capital coming through there's a lot of individuals who have that wealth and need to build structures need to rebuild the city and they have to do it as fast as they can and there's this opportunity to rebuild it however they can with whatever means and materials and strategies and so I think that's a unique thing in America where what these industrialists and designers did is they looked around and they said what do we have at hand to use right now like in instead of me getting deep into like ideas and Concepts and philosophies and theories let's just make with what we have and what did they have you had the steel frame you had the the besser process for making steel had been patented you had the otus elevator which had been patented so you have a frame you have an elevator that can bring materials as tall as the frame is to keep building it right you have the telephone there's electric lights uh uh glass and glazing large Windows is being made more more possible and the skyscraper is born steel frame goes up keep going keep going keep going because we can keep building as tall as we can get steel up there and and if you look at sort of the slow evolution of the skyscraper in Chicago at the end of the 19th century they start by like struggling with style because they're really tall but they look like they want to be these neoclassical buildings with with neoclassical details columns and capitals and there's a distinct base middle and top just like Greek columns have and and that eventually get stripped as they realize that because we have a steel frame the outside of the building doesn't have to support any weight it doesn't have to have stones on it all the structure is coming from the inside in the frame that's tied to the core with the elevators so more and more glass or glazing gets put on the outside of buildings and you see that ratio get reversed the ratio IO of like stone or opaque materials to glass is like 8020 for a while and then slowly it becomes 50/50 and then by by the time you even realize it in in uh 1900 1910 buildings are like 80% glass on the outside and just a little bit of opaque stuff on the floor lines to hide the structure um and so I think that that like iconic American thing the skyscraper which we always associate almost more with Manhattan starts in Chicago uh because of the things that are available and are at hand and I think that has more to do with an American attitude than getting caught up in in well what's been done previously you know what what's the historical Heritage of our city and how can we build in such a way to both pay homage to that while making something new there's none of that because it's it's such a it's such a new country yeah it's interesting I I had heard you um refer to the us as like such a young country in comparison to the countries in Europe and it almost resembles um like the life of a person right like when you're young you're much less focused on sort of the traditions of past and you're just sporadically just trying to try things with whatever materials you have at hand and perhaps we could characterize the attitudes of older folks as being one of much more of a focus on the tradition and sort of the experiences of past right yeah maybe I mean people tend to be again not to generalize but people tend to be more liberal and radical when they're younger and then more conservative when they're older right yeah yeah I wonder how this sort of connects to the behaviors of the city in and of itself you know you think about Silicon Valley in San Francisco and just how much innovation of humanity at scale occurs you know in this place where that kind of attitude is at the focal point of how a lot of these ideas get started right yeah that's interesting with Silicon Valley I mean you can look at the the new Big projects that are built around that area as well and see how they sort of reflect the thinking that's going on there uh is it the new yeah one of the new Google buildings I sent you a photo of this one it's got the um it's an interior photo that's well lit um it's got what they call dragon scale Roofing pattern on the outside it's kind of an interesting project it was done by um B Engel group he's a uh Danish architect and heatherwick I think is the name of the office and they were they were trying to figure out like how do you design a corporate like or a workplace an office environment in the 21st century for like a tech giant like Google it it can't it shouldn't look like the office environment of the 1960s and 70s from like Mad Men you know with like the grid of lighting on fluorescent lighting on the ceiling and a bunch of cubicles it's got to be more open than that more Dynamic than that more flexible than that so they knew they had to bring natural light in but not too much because if you have too much natural light you just bake people inside a space right so instead of just a glass Dome they had to come up with a weight to allow just the right amount of indirect natural light and that's how they made that that dragon scale pattern which has I think it has photovoltaic solar panels on the top those sort of scales and then on the inside you can see the way natural light comes in you don't see any cubicles you don't even see any offices rather what you see are like Terraces and large like wide stairways with intermediate Lings that sort of float in the middle of space and to me it what it shows is like the attitude of you know why can a very important meeting with millions of dollars at stake happen on a Stairway you know why can't it happen while we're walking and talking when all the way back to the Greeks that's when the most important ideas come up anyway when we're walking and talking and that's why you see like those interesting Landings with plants where people can sit off the side of a Stairway or up on a balcony with a view and on multiple layers and it's just a much more Dynamic and open uh workplace or office environment than what we would usually find so maybe that's that's one way that we see it it almost resembles a greenhouse and maybe sort of like the the analogy there is that when you think about a greenhouse we think about it as a place where we host species of let's say plants for example that are perhaps in endangered and maybe the the sort of synonym there analogy is that like there's a lot of ideas in which we can think of as being endangered or sort of having to be care for or ideas that are sort of really Divergent and maybe a company like Google those are the kind of ideas they value in the potential of those ideas to be very Innovative right it's their own ecosystem you're right yeah it should be a place where Dynamic things happen where living organisms interact with each other yeah that's the way they see it I think what would you say sets apart the great Architects from the not so great well what's the criteria for great you know what's the criteria for one has to establish a a criteria for judgment who's doing great stuff and who's not I mean first of all I wouldn't even say great Architects I would say great works of architecture because any architect is capable of something good or something crappy you know if you look at like the course of an architect's work there might be plenty of things that are good and there's something where it's you know what were you thinking so there's I think there's good projects and ones that are not so good my my criteria always comes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of engaging all of the senses I think that I think that a multi-sensory experience in the built environment is always more memorable and for that reason it's typically more meaningful for us as well um The Works that do not engage all of the senses usually focus on just site just one of our senses how things appear without taking into account depth foreground Middle Ground background what it's going to feel like for our bodies in in time and space and I think that can be that can be a little bit offputting so multi-sensory experience is a big one I think and understanding where we have come from as a species because Paleolithic times what were our eyes trying to do for us our eyes were trying to see across um landscape right see across bushes see across Tall Grass trees so that we can a see if predators are coming after us and B see if whatever prey we're hunting we can sneak up on so what I'm getting at is our eyes love texture in depth layered texture um so I think I think if you can do that in in projects that's usually great as well and if you don't if it's just flat blank surfaces without texture and depth I would say that's not so great personally yeah I guess what I'm trying to get at with the whole sort of like drawing a distinction between great Architects per se and and not so great is that I think in an educational context making it clear and communicating to students what the ideal is is really important right if you think about maybe a lawyer in training students are sort of communicated like listening to your clients intensely being present forming great arguments showing up there's like certain let's say fundamentals of what makes an ideal lawyer what we can regard as being an ideal lawyer and I'm curious like in architectural education what would be considered sort of like the pillars of what makes an ideal architect in our world well the first of all the analogy to law is a really good one I thought about that a lot in the past as well because like I said you have to get a certain kind of Education and Training to do both architecture and and law but also law depends on on case law unprecedent right whatever has happened in the past major decisions that have been made in the past by certain uh justices or judges uh have a big impact on what happens in the future and law lawyers have to study a lot of precedents in order to be competent right so that that's the other side of it yes you have to serve your client's interests but you're also responsible for knowing the significant decisions of the past and I think architecture operates in a really similar way because it's also a service industry you were at the service of the client clients paying you to do something for them if they tell you to to do a home or a building in a certain way you're you know you have to convince them if you want to do it in a different way which means you need to know a lot about the significant things of the past which are precedents so like when I teach art history and I teach architectural history that's basically what the course is it's just a whole long list of Precedence of significant examples from the past and here's why they they are important and the student who's better equipped with that knowledge of Precedence that's the student who's going to be better able to invent and innovate it was Colin r one of the most influential teachers in architecture of the 20th century Colin Rose said that uh knowledge of Precedence and invention are just two sides of the same coin you can't you can't be Innovative or inventive if you don't also have knowledge of significant precedence how is architectural education evolved throughout history and how do you anticipate it evolving in the future yeah well I think it I think it's evolved largely in relation to technologies that are made available for design so the way that we present and represent like we were talking about earlier that's changed a lot um what are other ways that it's evolved there was a time when the whole history curriculum was not even part of architectural education when modern Architects felt like they had to get rid of history get rid of the past so that all they could do was make new things that was of course a fallacy because you can't make new things without knowing what came before but there was a time when those modern Architects became heads of architecture schools and just got rid of the history curriculum so the fact that history in the study of Precedence has back maybe that's another kind of evolution um I think what's happening today ju in architectural education is like this architectural pedagogy is like becoming aware of itself it's becoming fully conscious and that means it's aware of its strengths but also its anxieties and there's a lot of discussion right now about how toxic if you like that word um the educational culture can be in terms of like working young adults late into the night uh for deadlines and really exhausting individuals and then when they graduate and go get a job they're treated the same and they're paid very poorly for their work so there there's a reconsideration of that because architectural education has this stigma of of doing that like uh they they weed a lot of students out early in the curricula by working them long hours being very strict being very harsh at presentations uh reviewers or judges critics can be very harsh that's been what has happened in the past and there start of a Recon beginning a reconsideration of that to see if maybe maybe there's a better way to deal with to with education today that that says you don't have to pull all nighters three nights in a row to meet a deadline to present a project that's actually not healthy for you um rather to work as part of a team where everybody has responsibility um and you know you don't have to exhaust yourself to that degree that because that did happen in the past but it's it's a tough one because largely the education the the degrees that are awarded have to do with being able to get a job uh in the industry afterwards and and when you start when you start uh as an architectural graduate at an office you're generally paid very poorly in relation to like when you start as maybe a lawyer or a or a doctor of medicine and those are like I said the other ones where you need a certain degree and have to pass certain exams be licensed to do it so I think that's what's been that's what I've seen change most like technologies that are used and and I'm referring to like 3D digital softwares but also the use of AI and the use of like robots to help design and make things and then just the culture that comes with I guess hierarchy of power like the teacher or the instructor and the students in that designed Studio usually it's like a ratio of one to anywhere between 10 and 20 uh what's that relationship like like is the teacher really harsh you have to be doing this all night if you didn't if you didn't work on this for a 100 hours in in a few days then you're not going to pass or is it more of a reciprocity of like I've done this before I went through the same education as you I know I know why you're struggling with this right now let's work together to to see if we can find Solutions I think that's the things that I see I heard you mention Ai and I'd love to know if you agree or disagree with this observation that I have if you think about it from first principles it seems like when someone hires an architect the individual who's hiring them is prompting them with what they're looking to receive from a design perspective and then the architect outputs a design right and I'm curious how this sort of relates to maybe using things like chat gbt in which I as a user of chat gbt and providing it with a prompt and then receiving some kind of output and maybe how this is sort of affecting ways in which architectural educational institutions are sort of like pivoting towards the use of AI systems perhaps and and maybe the ways in which that might enable or augment the the workflow of an architect in the future yeah I don't know that it that's that's still changing so much it's hard to predict right I mean I think you make the you make the a good parallel in the in the prompt and then the output it it's as old as the profession of Architecture is the relationship between the client and the architect and what that's like I mean I I would say as a bit of background that relationship has seen a little bit differently by the public in America than it is in Europe for example um because in Europe there's like a greater expectation from the public to have well-designed things uh there's like a greater aesthetic taste on the whole I would say in Europe because of that history and Heritage and the public in America doesn't necessarily have the same demand for for Quality design or at least I should say is not maybe willing to pay for it as readily as in Europe so there there's a reason that like what's the statistic something like 2% of all homes that are built in America are designed by architects right everything else is designed by contractors and there's a reason right it's it's a lot cheaper so you have to pay the experts the architect who knows what good design is and how to give that to you you have to pay them to get that quality back and so yes the client might say to you I want ABC and d and nothing else in this project you have to do those things it's the responsibility of the architect to say C is not a good idea for what you're interested in D is going to cost you more money and if if I do e it's going to cost more upfront but it's going to save you money afterwards because it's going to naturally light and provide you you know with a fresh water cycle after five years whatever it might be so like it's it's tough because some clients are more open to that education than others right some clients are are more willing to um to to take that advice from the expert the architect and other clients are are saying no you're at my service you do what I say you said something really interesting there which was was something approximating that in America there's a much lower willingness to pay the premium to have a great architect s of like design what what project you're looking to carry out and thinking about how AI having a deflationary effect in all the fields sort of affecting perhaps what we can anticipate in the future is AI might lower the cost of great architecture by virtue of making an architect per unit much more productive than an architect would have been in the past and maybe that'll mean that architecture and sort of like the Aesthetics of buildings will be something that let's say improves although you know I'm sure a lot of the aesthetic experience is subjective but maybe generally speaking it might improve in countries like America where there's a much lower willingness to pay a premium for great designs right yeah I think that some design offices are trying to figure that out uh how AI can help with like smaller details are components of buildings that are more modular and so can be repeated easily uh especially in terms of like you know small unit housing I think you're right about that and it it couples with the Technologies we have that are able to build things more efficiently as well and so there's a lot of groups working with robots to to build things quicker more efficiently and with less um injuries right than with manual labor as well yeah I wonder if we should think of AI is sort of like a democratizer of great architecture because maybe in the future sort of architect um architecture firms will have you know designers that are well sought after and maybe they'll have a model in which you know a person seeking to build residential homes in America loves the work of this architect And if every single sort of like unit they're building is really replicable they might go to the firm and say hey like I'll just input this prompt to the the model you have built that sort of like replicates the work of this architect I really like and it lowers the cost of of the design and because most of the units are replicable it makes a project like that much more practical right yeah I could see that happening I don't I don't know if that I would be in favor of it but I could see it happening yeah I mean in a way in a way a version of it happens already When contractors and developers have just like a three- ring binder like a catalog of different styles that you can choose for your house right and for the most part they're what people call Cookie Cutter right they're the same floor plan maybe small differences and the outside you can dress up as a as a a you know Spanish mission Revival or like a Northeast arts and crafts or whatever it might be so in in a way they already have that that catalog there and you know there's a lot of homes that are what you would call Craftsmen they are close to prairie style which came from Frank Floyd Wright so yeah I could see AI just making that whole choosing cataloging system more efficient maybe um that troubles that's troubling to designers who place a lot of value in authorship in the idea that I'm I'm making this thing I'm designing this thing for my expertise for you and therefore it's custom you know it's it's a oneoff thing and that's partly what makes it special yeah to round out our our conversation I want to go back to something you said early in our conversation which was sort of theory functioning as a mediator between the Observer and sort of like the work that they were observing I'm curious if there's any ways you anticipate that evolve in through the future maybe through things like AI um or other sort of like emerging Technologies and sort of like how users let's say or observers um can learn more about the architecture that they're observing I just you know I'm not I'm as far from an expert on AI as I can be so I don't want to make comments on that but I I will say that there's things I've heard of are things I I've I've read about in relation to like neuroscience and how that's developing and how we can map sort of how sensory input affects certain psychological responses say in in users of a building so that if you're if you're wearing a certain apparatus that can help chart or record how your body maybe responds in certain environments we can learn from from that I can easily see how that data set would then feed into what AI pulls from when it's given a prompt and has to then output something for a desired a desired effect right yeah and I guess the more sorry what was that I was just gonna say that that that what's interesting is that make come all the way back to what we started with which is the fallacy that uh an intention will be will have an equitable outcome um so even with AI if you intend for a certain outcome with the design of like a built environment and it pulls from a certain data set all it can give you is something that came from an already existing data set right and design when when design is innovative when it's advancing and not just repeating what's already been done what design does is it gives us things that have not yet existed it's hypothetical in that when I design something it's the first time it's existed and then somebody makes it so that that I could see being a sort of Gap right and and what we expect AI to give us in terms of whether it's Innovative could be something new could lead to serendipitous and surprising things rather than just a combination of things that have already existed yeah the work in Neuroscience you mentioned I find really interesting because I would imagine architects of past that would think about how their design would elicit certain emotional experiences in The Observers they were going off of much more low resolution information right and maybe as we can gather higher resolution data about sort of the emotional experiences an observer is is having in a building it provides more information to the architect and maybe enhances their ability to elicit the kinds of emotional experiences they're looking to elicit through their design right yeah maybe but it it's such a it's such a difficult thing to try to achieve because I mean how how much do we as how much do designers of built environments want to elicit emotional responses in the first place because a lot of what buildings are made for is so that we can do things not have emotional responses right unless it's like a particular exhibit in a in a gallery or something that's meant to do that so I think it always comes back to how open you are to unexpected things happening in the space that you design because I see it all the time with like especially young design students like first year architecture students you'll always hear them talk about their design projects in this like cause and effect way which is you walk through the door and you see the light coming in the Skylight and you feel its warmth and all and you feel welcome and you walk into the space you see like the the red the painted red structure in the corner and it makes you feel warm because it's red and then on and on and on what you see or what you come upon makes you feel a certain way and that's a natural way for us to think right away when we're designing but it's not the way we actually experience spaces in reality because there's all sorts of preconditions cultural the way you were raised or even just that day you may you might be in a bad mood because you went outside it's raining you forgot your umbrella and then you walk into the space and that's not going to affect you in nearly the same way as if you just had a really good cappuccino and you're in a great mood and then you walk into the same space there's all sorts of parameters that can totally disrupt the intention versus outcome ratio yeah well Braden I've really enjoyed our conversation the closing question I ask every guest is if you were 20 years old at this current moment what Fields would you study and what problems would you aim to solve does does fields of study mean at at the University level or just in general it could be at the University level or extracurricular maybe how you would combine them and taking an interdisciplinary approach you know I uh the other day I watched the talk you had with I forgot his name he was the he teaches philosophy at SF state was it epistemology I think yeah Carlos moner it's a metaphysics and epistemology I liked his response to this question because he didn't so much say like what the 20-year-old should study but like what you should read which I think is a really good response it's you know what you should be interested in I think above above anything else young adults have to be curious it's it's a it's all about curiosity you have to be willing to ask questions and learn something that will probably disrupt your previously held attitudes you have to be comfortable with that discomfort and so that that means reading things in a way but I mean I asked about University because I don't it seems weird coming from somebody who teaches at University but I don't think that every 20-year-old needs to get a University degree um you you there's lots of other avenues to go or another way of putting that is I think that maybe there are degrees that ought to be restructured at universities that are more based on trade and circle skills like you see at community colleges a lot of times but in general like what should you study I I I mean everybody's different like you have to explore your passions right what it is that you're interested in and so I can only speak like when I was 20 I studied abroad as part of university and that that changed my life I mean that's what exposes you to to other cultures that's what helps build empathy for that culture that's what helps you start to be curious about questions like well the way I was raised tells me what they're doing there is wrong but they're doing it and they seem okay so that that already that little Paradox or that little friction creates more curiosity and so I guess my answer to your question what you should study maybe is should you travel or not and I say yeah you need to go elsewhere and I think the last thing I saw want is that 43% of Americans have passports so less less than half of our US citizens like have obtained what they need to go outside the country um uh and Canada I think it's 70% have passports and you could glean you could glean different conclusions from that right like Canada is much smaller and maybe in America we have more to visit within our own country it's expensive to travel and all that but uh I mean that that's how you that's how you learn that's how you learn about other cultures and then you can identify with other people who have different backgrounds were more able to have civil discussions and help each other in difficult scenarios what was the second part what problems to solve yeah a lot of the times I have people on who are sort of like in the startup space so you know a lot of them are thinking about problems that are sort of arising now in their stage of their careers and they wish you know they were 20 and they could look more into them because they think they're really interesting problems to solve but I guess it's up to the guest interpretation right right right yeah I could see that yeah I mean I I think that it would be a very general answer but the problems to solve would be probably those associated with the most dominant things for young adults today which tends to be uh social media and how a social media is not so social it's kind of isolating in a way so how how do we how do we resist and combat that um I think finding alternative ways to to interact with each other that back to like the design of of built environments how do we interact with each other in at the public level yeah I guess an interesting way of also answering the sort of problems to solve portion of the question is it doesn't have to be a problem that you solve for others right think about social media it's like maybe it's a problem that you solve for yourself given that you're sort of like subject to this product that can be very addicting and maybe corrosive to mental health in certain instances you know maybe maybe and and I think that sometimes we get too wrapped up in ourselves right and it can be a little selfish and and I think I think if most people just tried to help each other out the the issues with ourselves would be taken care of as well um but yeah the social media thing is a weird one because all the things the things we see dictate how we see right um it's called visual culture or I like to use the phrase visual conditioning what you see all the time dictates how you see and that affects you deeply psychologically because how you see affects how you think about yourself about other people um if we have time I have a couple of examples that might be us of course yeah yeah so one is like when I was when I was in college doing I was studying architecture and philosophy and the architecture Department took us to uh elementary schools in the area like to volunteer and teach them about architecture so I was in charge of teaching a like a perspective drawing workshop for third graders we draw buildings in perspective and uh if you ask third graders what they want to draw they always want to draw skyscrapers right skyscrapers Empire State Building so okay so we lay it out two-point perspective lines diminish three-point perspective so the the skyscraper diminishes towards the top as you're looking up at it uh this is 2004 I'm GNA date myself a little bit there but this is 2004 third graders okay so I walk around the room as they're drawing their skyscrapers and about half the students have uh smoke and Fire billowing out the top of the of the skyscraper didn't ask them to draw that okay just ask them to draw skyscrapers half the students in the room Fire coming out the top I'd say about 2third of those students had little stick figure people falling out of the of the building jumping out of the fire and smoke part so what's happened what's happened here they they have grown up seeing on TV every single day and in the newspapers their parents read every single day images of 911 and what they see at at the deeply like subconscious level now affects the way that they output what they draw and the way that they even think skyscraper they heard they heard skyscraper they drew 911 because of what they see all the time um like the second example just to bring it like more recently into today maybe more connected with what we see in social media is uh there's a class I teach up here in Oregon called introduction to the visual arts we do one day we uh do this big formal analysis of a painting I sent you the image if you want to show it it's uh jacqu Lou de's Death of Socrates great 18th century painting for a formal analysis because everything has a certain symbolism foreground Middle Ground background perspective great for that but in almost the middle is the figure of Socrates um and you see him because he's lit up in the light so it's it's it's very light and white against the dark background so your eyes are focused on it and he's in a certain posture and he's he's arguing why the unexamined life is not worth living and I ask all the students just to diagram things like who are The prominent figures where are they looking what are the symbolic objects Etc anyway kind of similar to the 911 thing I walk around the room I look at the way that they're diagramming and analyzing this painting and I'd say probably half the students have drawn Socrates with this like ripped physique uh see he's like somewhere between the Rock and like Brad Pit or something um he looks like he's about to go to like an MMA fight for like a Hollywood Hollywood movie or something and you that that's not how he looks in the painting I did not ask them to to draw that but but what are you getting there like the students when they see the male figure in the middle are drawing the male male figure with a certain body image a certain physique that they have seen so frequently right to the point that that that male body needs to look like this hyper idealized male masculine physique that we see all the time on Instagram on television and everywhere which is ironic because I mean Socrates was widely known to be one of the ugliest people in Athens people you can find that anywhere but yet you know students are drawing him in that way so what we see all the the time dictates how we see and I mean I I can't think of a more important thing for for like young designers to understand right because you're making the environment that we see and interact in all the time and that's going to affect the way that people use those spaces see and think about things as well yeah and connecting that to your prior answer where you talked about sort of a mistake a lot of first year design students make of what I would say is having assumptions that aren't maybe based in reality maybe assumptions that aren't tested very well you talked about maybe having a red background on how students sort of describe how like a person would experience their design as walking in the Sun hits you you feel welcomed you see the red this is going to list at this and connecting this to sort of what your amazing answer you just gave of what we see impacting how we see a lot of times I think the value of opening yourself up to the perspective perspectives and lived experience of others is testing the assumptions that you're operating under right and a lot of these assumptions it's like the more you open yourself up and the more courage you have in learning about other lived experiences and also scrutinizing and examining the assumptions you yourself operate under lead you and Empower you to make much more resilient and sound assumptions which in turn affects what I would say is the quality of your work right and I'd imagine this is seen a lot in in in the field of architecture right maybe the the architect and I'm not sure if this is true or not but I I'm curious if you'd agree if maybe the Architects whom can have the most positive impact and will Define positive impact as um affecting what others see in a healthy way are the ones whose assumptions are the most resilient and the most scrutinized and the most let's say comprehensive I I think it can't hurt I think it can only make your work better better right it it it trickles into your work to the degree that maybe some people sense that maybe some people don't but at least there's the opportunity for it but I I like the words you're using that the individual has to be willing to be wrong and that regardless of the field that one enters that that's a big issue today right whether you're willing to enter into just a civil debate with another person and not let it get into defensive argument violent actions whether you you're willing to entertain somebody else's side to such a degree that you may be wrong and it it May challenge the beliefs that you've held for a long time are you are you willing to do that are you willing to even listen to it um that's such an important humility to have you have to you have to be curious and be willing to fail at things in order to have success or have achievements later I think you know I'm young so the only experience I have to draw from is you know my 20 years of being on this planet but I'm curious if you'd say that this is something that's become increasingly challenging now or if maybe it's something that has always been challenging and perhaps the proliferation of maybe social media platforms um exposes us us to that challenge much more which in turn makes it seem much more large in proportion to how it once was in Past Times or if it's something that's actually becoming much more of an issue I think that what I've found I I have found that younger students in the last five or six years that I've been been teaching um are a little bit less curious which I think is a is a big problem like I I have to sometimes spend more energy to to almost model how to be curious for students so they can start to get into the practice of asking questions of things that they're studying because the more the more questions you ask whatever it is you're analyzing you'll get answers and they'll find out more about it so just why is why is this happening why is that happening why is this noten happening um that that that has decreased a little bit and I don't know if there's a a way to pinpoint to pinpoint why but I don't know I've talked to a few colleagues about about whether it has to do with the you know the the diminishing attention span and the the ability to flip through images Tik Tok or Instagram or whatever it might be you know couple seconds at a time which doesn't really give you give you the opportunity to absorb something and then question it rather it's just scene next scene next scene next scene instead of here's a scene is there anything that makes me want to question what's happening in it um that may have something to do with it I'm not sure that's something that I've been trying to read about and research a lot more in my own in my own Theory work which is how how do certain works of art and design um engage us more in terms of curiosity spark our curiosity more and therefore make us more involved with the work so we almost participate with the work of art or design more and therefore it's a more memorable experience yeah it's it's It seems impossible to sort of like conceptualize all the variables that go into what makes a generation of people curious or more Curious less curious yeah um and I'm sure you know the education system and the experience people have in it growing up varies state by state county by county school by school but one thing did observe you know being in middle school and high school is there almost seemed to be this it almost seems to be implicitly communicated by Educators that there's a right way of looking at things and a wrong way of looking at things and it seemed like almost descent was wasn't wasn't rewarded and almost punished in certain instances you know and maybe that sort of leads to conditioning a generation of kids that view asent as both scary and maybe the behavior um that someone who has the wrong uh opinion or is on the wrong side of History takes in scrutinizing what you know the group conventionally decides to be what what's considered right or virtuous yeah that's interesting to hear you say that from your own experience because I think that's that's part of why I see less willingness to be like you said descent or even just curiosity because there might be a greater fear of being wrong uh especially like maybe the shame or embarrassment you might feel from being wrong in class setting a lot of other individuals um so in like history and Theory classes that I teach where there's a lot of debate everything's a gray area right there's no black and white so you always have to articulate where you are in that gray area and have a discussion students are afraid to be wrong so the first hurdle is always like don't be afraid I'm I don't I don't even care if you're right I just want to hear what position you have on it whether you can defend it and take somebody else's side of it right but that that itself is a skill that young adults have it takes a long long time to develop that and don't even get me started about then being able to write it in an essay you know like these are these are things that I don't know if middle school and high school education has done a poor job or a good job of it but I can speak from my experience where when freshman and sophomores get to the university level the majority are not very good at articulating a position on something and then being able to to write through it critically yeah and I guess if there's a case to make to young people to have the courage to think indep ently and the courage to sort of Express those views even um while recognizing the possibility of them being wrong is that if you think of most people um as living in sort of the state of group think and adopting the beliefs of others it makes it that much more rewarding for you personally and you know professionally I'd imagine in the future to be the kind of person that practices independent thinking and that has the courage to be wrong because it uh it'll equip you in ways in which others won't be equipped to tackle problems in the future yes certainly and I think this it's not a coincidence that I think um more and more people are interested in seeing what standup Comics have to say and comedy I think recently partly because you can flip through it quickly on social media and you can see little bits of standup but this is partly the role that comedians play in American society is saying the things that we're afraid to say um because they're funny or just because they're they're they're chaos against the order but that's quired a lot of times to make something that's uncomfortable somewhat comfortable for a little while just to hear it said or to think about it because of how absurd it is I I I think that that I think that's become a really interesting Dimension I think in society now is like what commedians are allowed to say in a free speech Society because sometimes they get in trouble and then you have to figure out like well where is that line then in a free speech society when the comedian is meant to be able to get up there and say anything they want whether they believe it or not not they're looking to get a a response from the audience right that's a really interesting to menion that you know I'm not asking my students to say the sorts of things that I see in some standup comedy shows in class necessarily but um that that like archetype and mythology of the trickster who's always like up to mischievous things to sort of take take the repetition in order and unsettle it to see what might happen afterwards that is a necessary part of social evolution yeah connecting this to my experience going through the education system and being young I would guess that there's these sort of protections that exist at a societal level and perhaps 30 40 years ago the general public lived and existed with this protection of if I'm just having a civil debate with somebody it's okay if we disagree and at the end of the day you know like we can let go of this need need or desire to only hold opinions that are true and we can sort of recognize our incapacity as human beings to have correct opinions about everything and maybe now that protection is sort of um it doesn't exist or maybe isn't as resilient as it is in the past and in comedy comedians have still preserved the the protection of I'm just a comedian and I'm here making jokes right and I'm just interested in making what's funny and maybe that's just like one area of society in which a protection has sort of like be been more resilient or sort of standed the test of time much more than this like General protection that perhaps people of past Generations uh benefited from and were able to leverage in conversation yeah maybe that's a good way of looking at it I think it it's interesting because there's a lot of cases I think where comedians are allowed to say something because they're a comedian they might not necessarily even believe it but their objective is to make people laugh and what I think is interesting is that a lot of people in the audience that hear something said can probably identify with the things that are said as as blasphemous you know as they as they might be and that's why I think it's so important to have that dimension of social expression that comedians bring to the table um I mean life is pretty uninteresting without humor and comedy right and it has to have that mischievous trickster chaotic element to it yeah I don't think we're doing that great of a job as well as communicating like the dangers of falling into that binary of thinking where you think there's right opinions and wrong opinions right because if you are operating in a framework in which opinions can either be right or wrong then there has to exist an Arbiter of correct opinions and there in lies sort of the vulnerability of living in a society where opinions can just be thought of as being wrong or right because the Arbiter of right opinions has so much power over like the conscious and the behaviors um of those who operate within that framework well the the illusion is that if something is right it will be right forever I mean science is very good at this right science is always looking to falsify itself and this is what people are not very good at but science says you know a theory is only is only good if we constantly attack it and always fail then we know that it's a pretty consistent Theory so science is good at admitting when okay this is no longer right this no longer works for us right look at look at the evolution of physics so if only people were the same way you know and like that's that's the way to test the the value or the truth value of something that you hold hold to be right is keep trying to falsify it if it if it uh if it if it crumbles or if it subsides due to your attacks then yeah maybe it's time to adapt something else or change it or let it evolve this idea is kind of abstract so I hope I can communicate it but it's interesting hearing sort of like the attitude a lot of people have in maybe history classes where there seems to be this sort of arrogance of like oh if I lived in this time I definitely would have had the capacity of self-examination to realize what was going on in regular life was wrong and I would have been the person who would have been self- examined enough to do the right thing whereas that kind of person seems also to be the same type of person that doesn't examine their own positions themselves so it's almost like living as if you're assuming that in the past you'd be very self- examined while in the present you're living as unexamined of a life as one could think about maybe that's a little extreme way to put it but you know you know what I'm trying to get at I do I do yeah yeah but it gives us Comfort to think that right it's it's lwh hanging fruit but it's it gives us comfort to say well if I had Liv at that time I wouldn't have done that I I wouldn't have listened to that leader right I would have rebelled but I mean that's that's the advantage of of retrospect like in the present are you actually being that critical of all the things around you that dictate what you do every day probably not right yeah if anything a cool way of looking at history maybe is thinking okay cool these people were born with these sort of set of beliefs that dominated that culture at that time and if anything the credit should be distributed to Those whom were as self examined as possible and had the courage to carry out sort of like the products of that self-examination and their behavior you know like maybe not expect them to be as moral for lack of a better term as people are today but just being more moral than was like average that's a bad way to put it but I think you get what I'm trying to get at right like maybe that's how we could sort of like attribute credit into like how courageous a person was to sort of like onset just a bit more progress in the window of time that alive well courage courage is the word right because you have to be willing to fail uh otherwise there's not courage so yeah if you wanted to study those people in history you would study the people who were willing to be wrong publicly um if if everybody if everybody thinks they're right about everything all the time then you won't have any any change there won't be anything interesting happening so who who is willing to be wrong and then you well they must have been pretty important to them if they were willing to be wrong and willing to fail um and then once you fail do do you do you adopt other viewpoints other attitudes do you shift your your like vector in the world at that point as well yeah well Braden I really appreciate you sharing your time with me I I really enjoyed our conversation thanks for being on I did as well thanks [Music] [Applause] [Music] Ju I

Channel: Atlas by Juan Martinez

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Id: NBokplk2bQU

Length: 104min 23sec (6263 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024