In and Out

Here is a video of Monty Python's John Cleese talking about creativity. As someone who has attempted to teach architecture I am thrilled to have one of my central beliefs reinforced: you can't teach talent and you don't have to.

The practice of design (I'll use design rather than architecture to make it clear I'm not writing about the business end of things) relies on serial shifts in perspective - from the very big to the very small and all the stages in between. I like to break things into groups based on the human body: things much bigger than a person, the width of spread arms, something you can hold in your hand, etc. The logic of a building should apply equally to all these things; this is what Vitruvius called proportion. It doesn't mean what it would today (the ratio of one thing to another) but the visible, tangible fact the same rules apply to the thing as a whole and in detail.

A designer's task is to continually switch from thinking on the scale of a room, to the scale of the building, to the scale of the city, to the scale of an object in the room, and on and on. This is further complicated by drawing to scale. In a sketch a small object (a handle or turn) can be bigger than the room it will eventually be in. You are fitting drawings on to a page (working with one size of object in the physical world) while translating ideas about many different sizes in your head. It is a complicated business - far too difficult to pursue unless you really care about it.

Now we can add to this Cleese's proposition about open and closed mental states. Think creatively for a given time, think analytically for a given time. Back and forth on and on.

Of his five criteria for an open state, space is the most interesting. Architecture schools never provide sufficient studio space. The accreditation boards demand a certain amount of physical space per student and no architecture school I have ever seen or heard of actually provides that much. So students have to make their own psychological space.

For generations this space was a couple feet surrounding the drawing board. With a drafting light shining on it, it becomes the center of the universe and, back bent and head down, the student could shut out the world. Now, of course, the computer has become the surrogate drawing board and center of the universe. Students keep their hands on keyboard and peripheral, wrap themselves in headphones playing music loud enough so nothing else gets through - isolation in an electronic carapace. Where this becomes problematic (assuming you see nothing inherently problematic with it) is switching between analytical and creative thinking.

For me this was a simple as going out for a smoke. Most of the clever thoughts I've had in my life have come to me in the cold, shivering, with a cigarette clamped between my lips. And this is, by itself, a strong argument for the three semester system (so there is at least a one in three chance I won't have to freeze my ass off while smoking). Or I could move someplace warmer than Canada - how hard could that be? Unless I chose Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, or Siberia it will be warmer than here.

Cleese's findings also go some way to validating my belief in the efficiency of inefficiency. No matter how much time you schedule for "being creative" you might need more and if you stress about it, you're fucked. For years culture, in the sense that newspapers use the word, has been centered in places where people spend a great deal of time doing fuck all. New York in the 70s - all anyone did was go to parties. Paris for about a century before that - sitting around drinking wine at night, sitting around drinking coffee during the day. Switzerland, on the other hand, not such a great cultural haven.