Spatial construction of meaning: four papers Formulation

摘要

Providing interesting descriptions of buildings is not easy. Like any other object, buildings have any number of properties which are amenable to direct description. They can also be described less directly by talking about their functions, the behaviours that they accommodate or generate, the cultural values that they represent. But what exactly are the properties which are significant, or important, to their being outcomes of a process of design formulation? The question is not always explicitly articulated but is nevertheless fundamental to systematic architectural criticism. Its complexity becomes apparent if a moment is taken to reflect about the nature of description in general. It is commonly accepted that descriptions are not neutral, that they are always selective, motivated and premised upon the implicit or explicit adoption of a point of view, a way of seeing. The point of view becomes embedded in the description through the selection of matters of importance as well as through the application of descriptive concepts. When objects are described as results of design formulation we have the additional constraint that description must address properties that objects do not merely happen to possess but rather possess as a direct consequence of design intentionality. This is equivalent to saying that we seek to retrieve a-posteriori a description of the object which must, at least in part, have existed a-priori for the object to be made in the first place. To affirm this does not suppose that the properties of interest were all prefigured in the designer's mind. As explicit design intentions interact with physical and mathematical constraints, as designers themselves try to make their intentions coherent, objects may well come to acquire properties as a consequence of design intentions which exceed the intentions themselves. This is precisely the reason why design formulation is not only a process of positing formal ideas but also a process of discovery. And this is why the task of description is relevant to design itself, and not only to the comprehension and criticism of design.