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Design And The Powerful Logics

Of The Mind's Deep Structures

By John Lobell

The Application of Systematic Methods to Designing

Proceedings of DMG3: The Third International Conference o f the Design Methods Group

Published by The design methods group, 1975

DMG-DRS JOURNAL VOL 9 NO 2

Donald P. Grant, Editor

1. INTRODUCTION

It is the position of this paper that most "systematic methods" of design suffer from being based on forms of logic not compatible with the complex space, time, and causality free logics the mind actually uses.

However, before elaborating on why I think this is so, I wish first to look at the recent history of architectural education in order to see how we arrived at where we are today. It is my belief that current "systematic methods" do not represent a new departure in architecture, but rather the last gasp of the dying approach begun by the Bauhaus. Therefore, this paper starts with a rather lengthy discussion of some of he design philosophy of the Bauhaus, then goes on to explore ways in which the mind works when designing, and finally looks at implications for teaching design.

2. REDUCTIVENESS IN SYSTEMATIC METHODS

"Indeed, since the book (Notes on the Synthesis of Form) was published, a whole academic field has grown up around the idea of 'design methods'--and I have been hailed as one of the leading exponents of these so-called design methods. I am very sorry that this has happened, and want to state, publicly, that I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design.

You are probably familiar with this statement by Alexander. If not, you might look it up. He goes on to say some not very nice things about people who study design methods. But even in this new preface, Alexander shows himself still caught up in the principles he is trying to repudiate. He still clings to the usefulness of the "diagrams" as:

"An abstract pattern of physical relationships which resolve a small system of interacting and conflicting forces, and is independent of all other forces, and of all other possible diagrams. The idea that it is possible to create such abstract relationships one at a time, and to create designs which are whole by fusing these relationships--this amazingly simple idea is, for me, the most important discovery of the book."

It is in this very statement, the attempt to deal with design, which is a holistic process, with a reductive system, that we find the primary problem with systematic methods of design. It is true that the conscious mind cannot juggle the numbers of variables necessary for a complex design problem, but this does not mean that systematic methods are the only alternative. Design is a holistic process. It is a process of putting together complex variables whose connection is not apparent to any describable system of logic. It is precisely for that reason that the most powerful logics ever known have traditionally been used in the design process, that is, the powerful logics of the deep structures of the mind which operate free of the limitations of space, time and causality, and which have traditionally been responsible for most creative work in all of the sciences and the arts. Today it has gone out of fashion to believe that these powers are in the mind. This paper will deal with some of the reasons why this has happened and will suggest some remedies.

3. THE BAUHAUS AND CURRENT FALLACIES IN DESIGN METHODS

The problems with most "systematic methods" in architectural design lie in an historical situation which has its beginning in the philosophy of the Bauhaus, and which seriously infects architectural education and practice even today.

These problems lie in approaches so deeply taken fro granted, that we must look back before the Bauhaus to understand them. The problems lie in a misunderstanding and a misteaching of architectural history, in he fallacy of "basic design," in the false analogy of architectural design as "problem solving," and most of all, in the mistaken concept of designing from a program. In order to see these problems in a broader context, it is necessary to look back at a previous attitude toward architecture and architectural education, which might be conveniently referred to as the "Beaux Arts."

The Beaux Arts, long synonymous with decadence in architecture, is again arousing considerable interest, not the least of which is a show scheduled in Fall 1975 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For my purposes, I will be using the term very loosely, referring not to schools in France and the U.S., or to the system of education through competitions, but rather to some general attitudes towards architectural education up until the 1930's.

In the Beaux Arts education, history was integrated into the architectural curriculum. It was often taught by architects, and it was not only a study of the past, it was also study of the elements (columns, orders, vaulting, etc.) which he architect would be using in his or her buildings. These elements and their meanings were also known to "users" in the culture in general, as they were taught in elementary school. In the Bauhaus, history was forbidden, and, when it was finally reintroduced in its American offsprings (Harvard, I.T.T., etc.) history was typically taught by art historians rather than by architects.

In the Beaux Arts the student was introduced to design by designing the elements of buildings (also being studied in history and construction courses) and by designing buildings similar to existing monuments. The Bauhaus wished to break any connection with the past, and therefore substituted basic design, a presumably value-free (that is to say independent of any preconceptions, cultural or otherwise, of what a building should be) method of learning the basic elements of design (light and shade, texture, form, composition, etc.) The Bauhaus believed that architectural design was nothing more nor less than the solving of stated functional problems, while the Beaux Arts believed architecture to be the ordering of archetypal spaces to espouse and encourage human institutional and human individual values. It is this difference which lead to the major crime of the Bauhaus, the "program." Designing from a program assumes that a value-free, culture-free solution which does nothing more nor less than meet stated functional requirements is possible and constitutes a desirable architecture. Of course, neither is the case. The European modern and International Style architects, while espousing pure functionalism, were actually creating a style, no more value-free than the Beaux Arts styles they supplanted. However, the values of the International Style were against the richness of human experience, attempting to replace the complexities of life with the sterile mechanization of the hospital.

This sterile value of the European moderns came mostly from a romantic view of machine. Whereas Americans like Wright grew up with machines all around them, and accommodated them naturally into their architecture, the Europeans grew up in decaying Baroque cities and could only dream about what machines might eventually mean. However, the values of the European moderns are a digression. They have long since been rejected in most areas of architectural thought. It is their methods which are still with us, which continue in the tradition of "systematic methods," and which still constitute a danger to architecture and the build environment.

Today very few curricula are modeled after the Bauhaus, but much of the Bauhaus philosophy pervades architectural education, particularly in the belief that architecture can be value-free. History is weak in most schools, and is universally poorly integrated into design. We have attempted to reject the idea of historical continuity, and our students are ignorant of the extent to which we are still dealing with issues raised in the mid-nineteenth century. Students today have been led to believe that the social issues of poverty and alienation were invented in the 1940's, as an awareness of the engineering implications of systems building, industrialized building, etc. Yet I read in Pevsner's An Outline of European Architecture:

"However, by the time these buildings were designed (referring to the revival styles of he mid-1800s), a reaction had come and spread against so superficial--truly superficial--a conception of architecture. It did not originate with the architect. It could not; because it concerned problems of social reform and of engineering . . ."

Thus the issues of social relevance and engineering innovation are not culture-free problems amenable to functional solution. They are historical concerns, being worked out by a culture over a period of time and subject to all of he forces of history. Any attempt to deal with them outside of that context cannot succeed, yet we teach architecture without providing that context.

Similarly, many schools today still start the architectural education with basic design. We live in an alienated society, and architects are typically among the most vocal protestors of that alienation, but what could be more alienating than approaching architecture through basic design: that is to cut the student off from the symbol systems of his or her "middle class" suburban or urban background, and also from the symbol systems of vernacular American architecture and traditional Western architecture. Then the student is given cubes, grey scales, geometric patterns, woven textures, and color compositions as symbol systems within which to root his or her education and ultimately his or her career. No wonder an architecture is produced which is unsatisfying even to architects, not to mention the public in general; it is rooted in cubes, grey scales, geometric patterns, woven textures, and color compositions. The only criteria we have left with which to judge a building is a close fit functional criteria, and as Alexander points out in Notes , that is a negative criteria, that is to say we can only identify unsuccessful buildings. Success is measured only by lack of failure. In any other art form we can measure success by the fact that something meaningful is touched in us, but architecture has replaced meaning with function, first crudely under the Bauhaus, and now more subtly with systematic methods.

The misconception that architecture is "problem-solving" is also very much with us today. Problem-solving implies that success o failure of a design can be evaluated in terms of meeting or not meeting prestated (in the program) criteria. Yet the human experiences which a building is going to have to serve are far more complex that those which can be stated in any program. The fact that they cannot be written in a finite document does not, however, make them "subjective" or tentative, or in any way unreal. They are real, they are present, a good architect can respond to them, good critics can identify whether they are there or not, and users know whether or not the building is meaningful to them, independent of the responses environmental psychologists might get on their questionnaires.

A more specific description of what these meanings might be can be seen in the problems of the "program", a concept which is still very much with us. In designing from a program, we emphasize solutions to the functional problems stated in the program. In building a typical school, however, we would find that the teaching philosophy reflected in the program we started with has inevitably changed in the five to fifteen years from conception to completion. Then what happens? What happens is that either the building fails or we have to design in "flexibility: which is another word for a series of vacuous non-decisions represented by a lot of temporary or folding partitions. What are the alternatives? The alternatives are neither more flexibility, nor more ego on the part of the architect, nor some compromise between those two. The alternative is architecture , as it has been for over ten thousand years. By that I mean structures which embody and ennoble the archetypal human experiences and which allow a flow and change of specific functions within archetypal contexts. One simple example would be the Beaux Arts approach to designing a school (let's say an architecture school). The Beaux Arts architect would concentrate his or her efforts on four elements: an entrance; a lobby and major stair; galleries or nodes rather than corridors; and large, medium, and small spaces. The concern would be for each of the elements to be humanly meaningful, architecturally well designed (that is in regard to the relationship of form to human institutional and individual human values) and well related one to another (that is embodying in the forms the meanings of the relationships between the function). As long as there was the right amount of square feet, the building would have a good chance of serving many generations or users. The general recognition of this point is in the sentiment on many campuses that any old building is better than any new building. One case in point is at the university of Pennsylvania where the architecture school left its old Fine Arts building (which had previously been a school of dentistry) for a new building for which the school did the programming. Many in the architecture school did the programming. Many in the architecture school now want the old building back, which is doing fine as a geology laboratory. The new building was outdated in less than five years. The old building is as good as ever, as one graffiti sentiment testifies: "Despite geological evidence to the contrary, this will always be the Fine Arts building".

This kind of design is difficult to teach because of a fundamental assumption that the European moderns made, and that we still accept, namely that meaning is not a legitimate subject in design and that those parts of the mind amenable to meaning cannot legitimately b dealt with. The overt claim of the European moderns was that they were eliminating decoration. They were also eliminating meaning.

4. LOGIC AND THE DEEP STRUCTURES OF THE MIND

The primary way in which "systematic" methods of design have perpetuated the sterility and alienation of the European moderns is in the assumption that design can be derived from a series of rules or a "logic". Of course, any method of design has its own logic. The problem with most systematic methods, however, is the need to overtly express the logic, and thereby reduce it to a form expressible on paper. The brain itself (as only a small part of the mind) is working with 10 billion neurons and 1000 billion synaptic connections. There is no way in which the mind could be working with any of the "either-or" or "if A and B, therefore C" type logics typically used in systematic methods. While the logics of the mind are not known, it appears to be operating in hierarchies of "packets" which interact cooperatively". The mind is apparently holographic in its operation, that is to say it works in hierarchies of wave interference patterns which allow thought forms to exist simultaneously in all parts of the brain, but with diminishing resolution if smaller and smaller areas are isolated. This system of operation, or "logic", permits the mind its immense power, infinitely greater in many kinds of thought systems than any synthetic logic or computer. For the purposes of this paper, I will be referring to that part of the mind which deals with simple linear logics as the cerebral levels of the mind, and to that part of the mind which exercises powerful logics to deal with complex issues beyond space, time, and causality as deeper structures of the mind.

Immanuel Kant identified space, time, and causality as properties of the mind; lenses through which all knowledge comes to us. Thus he felt our world to be permanently colored by space, time and causality, just as vision would be by rose colored glasses. Today we know that space, time and causality were particular and not general; that they are culture dependent, that they are only one of many possible ways in which the mind can see the world. While most forms of logic are still limited by a simplistic linear view of the world (particularly those forms of logic accessible to architects) it is known that the mind's powers extend far beyond this linear view, and indeed since 1900, all of the arts as well as theoretical physics have rejected space, time, and causality. From the dream state we learn of some of he mind's greater powers. For example, I once had a dream in which I saw something which was both my grandfather and a leaf. It was not half one and half the other, it was not translucent images of each overlaid on each other, and it was not alternately imaging one and then the other. It was simultaneously and clearly both. There is no way I can bring that image into my waking mind, but it was definitely there in my dream. We might be tempted to reject this image as imagined because it is contrary to the laws of reality--that two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Yet since quantum mechanics two tings can occupy the same place at the same time, and the dream is not contrary to the laws of reality. It is only contrary to the powers of the more cerebral levels of the mind as opposed to the powers of the deeper structures of the mind. Systematic methods of design have access only to the more superficial cerebral levels of the mind. Traditional design methods, through the creative process, have access to the deeper structures of the mind.

It is traditional to refer to the powers of the creative process as "intuition", thereby implying that these powers are vague, undefined, subjective, and of unreliable accuracy. The people making these references are usually operating out of systems which reject the complexities of deeper thought. These complexities, however, are not vague and unreliable. They are perhaps difficult, but they can also be very precise, clear in their own way (that is clear in the ways the complex reality of the world are clear) and in fact form the basis for almost all conceptual developments in the sciences as well as in the arts.

Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation , surveys the processes of the mind in actual creative accomplishments in the sciences and arts. What is exceptional about this study is that it is not an abstract statement of what Koestler thinks the creative act should be (as are Alexander's Notes and man other presentations of systematic methods) but rather of what it is and always has been. The psychological processes of the creative process have been with us for thousands of years and have grown out of the natural abilities of the mind. Most systematic methods presume not even to know what those abilities are, but rather to propose what the mind should be able to do on the basis of a year or so of study and a system of logic which grows off of paper. Alexander's Notes is a prime example of this, and even his own refutation in the paperback edition keeps to this assumption.

The design act and the design process are typical examples of the creative act and the creative process. As described by Koestler, the creative act is "the sudden shaking together of two previously unconnected matrices . . ." (I would suspect that it might be two or more.) The point is that these two or more matrices, or systems of thought, which come together, could not have been connected by any logical process. The logic of the cerebral part of the mind, the logic which we use on paper, the logics which we can program into computers, and the logics which we can represent in mathematics, are not nearly powerful enough to connect the kinds of disparate systems of thought which the deeper structures of the mind can bring together. The deeper parts of the mind have access to logics which we have not yet been able to represent on paper, but which are powerful enough to do the job of bringing complex and unrelated matrices together, just as they were able to bring my grandfather and a leaf together in my dream in a way which I have been unable to revisualize with the cerebral levels of my mind.

Space does not permit a more detailed description here of the creative act, but it is described very well in Arthur Koestler's The Art of Creation . Another source for this information is Anton Ehrenzweig, The Psycho-Analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing. Ehrenzweig describes the workings of the unconscious mind in the forming and perceiving of the arts, and the ways in which man of the arts today represent our freedom from space, time, and causality. Of particular interest is his chapter on the time-free qualities of hearing. Milic Capek has a similar analysis of hearing in The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics in which he shows that vision is connected to levels of the mind which are unable to comprehend the complexities of contemporary physics as represented in mathematics. He shows, however, that auditory models are adequate to represent contemporary physics, as hearing is connected to levels of the mind which can operate with powerful logics free of the limitations of space, time, and causality. There are of course man others today working along these lines.

5. ACCESS TO DEEP STRUCTURES OF THE MIND AND THE DESIGN PROCESS

If this argument for the powerful logics of the deeper structures of the mind is accepted, if it is accepted that access to these levels of he mind may be termed the creative act or the creative process, and if it is accepted that most of the conceptual advances in all of eh sciences and arts are made through access to the levels of the mind, and if it is accepted that design is a creative act in that it brings together two or more disparate matrices or systems of thought which can only be connected by the powerful logics of the deeper structures of the mind (a lot to accept in a paper this short), then the question is, how do we obtain access to these levels of the mind in order to design? Another phrasing of the question would be: what kind of design process would be sympathetic to the logical powers the mind actually has?

The answer to this question turns out to be a description of the design process pretty much as it has been traditionally understood. Only it becomes necessary to replace mystical concepts like intuition, creativity, and blind faith in an egotistical studio master with ideas which make sense to us. In other words, it is necessary to formulate a description of the design process which may not make it any less painful, but which will at least make sense of it. In essence the learning of the design process is learning to gain access to the deeper parts of the mind. It is essentially an unconscious process, and any attempt to learn it consciously can only end in failure. An excellent analogy is that learning to design is like learning to ride a bicycle. We learn to ride a bicycle through weeks of trial and error during which time nerves and muscles throughout the body unconsciously come into precise coordination so that they can accomplish a job so complex there is no way we could do it if we tried to keep conscious control over every part of it. For example, in going into a turn we are coordinating visual, kinesthetic, and inner ear data to which the muscles controlling the limbs and the balance are making instantaneous responses. The only way we can learn all of this is to let the body learn it through trial and error, including a lot of falling off of the bicycle.

The same is true of design. In design, we bring a lot of data into the mind, much of it unquantifiable, and we allow that data to dip in and out of the deeper structures of the mind, each time coming up with new integration forged by the powerful logics of the deep mind. However, we cannot consciously force these deep parts of the mind to function, just as we help the body to learn to ride a bicycle. The way this learning is done is through practice not through the conscious memorizing of steps in a system.

Again, the analogy to learning to ride a bicycle is useful. Imagine a group of 100 students. Fifty of them spend a year learning bicycle theory and bicycle riding methodology (including theories of balance, muscle-nerve coordination, the gyroscopic effects of wheels, etc.) and fifty do not. At the end of the year, all 100 students start taking lessons in actually riding bicycles. There will be no difference in how long it takes members of the two groups to learn now to ride the bicycle. Riding and talking about riding are two different things. Quoting Alexander from the introduction to Notes : "Study of method by itself is always barren . . ."

However, if it can be shown that systematic methods do not contribute to design ability, and that the design process is involved with deep and unconscious parts of the mind, does this mean that design must always be "intuitive", random, and left to chance? I do not think so. Just as there can be meaningful ways of learning to ride a bicycle, even though riding cannot be represented in a diagram, so there can be meaningful ways of learning to design.

The creative act, this dipping down into deep structures of the mind does not come easily and will seldom happen if left to chance. We can improve its chances of happening, not by making it happen but by letting it happen. If we closely observe the workings of our minds we find that we can feel the moment when the "click" takes place, when these disparate matrices come together. It often happens at a more quiet moment, and it always happens after the relevant information or givens of the problem have been churning around in the mind and in the hand for some time. It is always forgotten by those advocating systematic methods that design is both done and learned with the hand . Just as I showed earlier that the eye and ear have access to different parts of the mind, so also does the hand. In fact the hand probably has access to those structures of the mind most relevant to design, structures which simply cannot be reached through the eye or the ear.

Learning to design requires repeated practice, the completion of design problem after design problem to allow the "muscles and nerves" of the mind to develop the coordination to let the process of dipping into deep structures take place, and to identify the times and the ways in which this dipping down most easily takes place for each of us.

"Systematic methods" in design often originate from people who are unable to achieve the necessary letting go in order to have this access to deep structures, either through lack of natural ability or through poor education. Finding this process mysterious (particularly since they have never experienced it), they seek to demystify it through the establishment of a list of steps, which, if followed, guarantee a design solution. While following thee steps may be more suited to the personalities of designers who adopt them, it is not suited to designing and invariably leads to failure. Since, however, the original motivation to seek a systematic method was an expression of personality and not pragmatic, many systems methods designers respond to failure by saying that the system was not rigorous enough or was not given enough time, or needs more funds for research. No amount of failure can convince such a person that systems methods themselves cannot work, since such an admission would require either abandoning the field, or opening the mind to its deeper structures, a process too threatening or even impossible for a certain kind of personality.

Measurements of the actual workings of the mind in reaching into its deep structures is not necessarily an issue for the designer sine the subjective exploration of this process can lead to results as good as can be obtained by any objective measuring. However, this may not always be the case. Work in measuring brain waves, the practice of meditation, dream analysis, and the analysis of right brain-left brain phenomena indicate that more may soon be known about he measurement and perhaps some day about the learning of the creative act. Interesting work is being done with analogies between orgasm and creative processes. Recent measurements show that brain wave activity shifts over from the left side to the right side at the point of orgasm. In effect, orgasm is a creative act. We all know that orgasm can be intensified by allowing it to start to surface, then holding it down and allowing it to come up again later, at which time it will be much more intense. The same is true of the creative act, and numerous analogies and direct relationships between creative energy and sexual energy are being explored.

         Eventually these studies of the mind's workings in the creative process may lead to increasing the mind's creative powers and to improvements in teaching design, but for the moment that is a way off and we have to work with what we have now. That does not mean, however, that we are left with mystery and intuition. The problem with traditional methods of teaching design has been that they don't work when the design instructor is himself of herself a poor or inexperienced designer. The process of teaching design is in he traditions of any teaching where understanding is passed on by a master who has the understanding. It cannot be passed on by someone who knows about the understanding. In that way the teaching of design is similar to the passing on of enlightenment in the Zen tradition. Only someone who has the understanding can distinguish true and false steps on the part of the student. In the past fifteen years there has been a growing trend of architecture students going on for graduate degrees, and then going directly into teaching without becoming accomplished as designers. The students of these teachers now think that design cannot be taught, since that is their experience, and they then search for systematic methods. The solution to this dilemma is for design to be respected and taken seriously, for it to be realized that learning to design and designing are often painful processes which cannot be learned by everyone, and that the qualifications for teaching design are many, but particularly include being a good designer.

        

•  THE DESIGN PROCESS

How one designs is really no mystery. All of the traditional techniques are useful: programming, analysis, bubble diagrams, color-codes, flow charts, and area studies. However, none of these are in themselves part of the design process. They are only tools to put information into the mind in useful forms. All of these tools need to be studied and manipulated with he eye and the pencil (the hand has a wisdom of its own which the designer must learn to respect) allowing the deeper structures of the mind to do their work. If these preparations have been done adequately (and this is subject to systemization), then the deep mind will start to shake together various unconnected givens, using its powerful logics to form relationships which no cerebral, paper, or computer logic could even begin to handle, as they are all limited by space, time, and causality.

The mind must be trusted in this process. We must let go and let it happen. The more we try to force it the less likely it is to happen. Sometimes it doesn't happen when we need it and for some people it never happens. That's the way it goes and systematic methods are no substitute. When a design problem is resolved successfully some designers try to hang on to the solution and reuse it. They figure you never know when you are going to get another one. This is particularly dangerous and can be seen in students who try to repeat a successful problem. Every problem is unique and requires a new creative solution. Rehashing old solutions is the beginning of death.

The only way design is going to be resurrected in architectural education is through having accomplished designers teaching design and students practicing design. We have witnessed ten years of systematic methods invading the schools and have yet to see any humanly meaningful buildings come of that approach. It should by now be apparent that what was hailed as a new beginning was only the death throes of the Bauhaus.

        

Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form , Harvard University Press, from the preface to the paperback edition, 1971.

Ibid.

The concept that the essential fallacy of the Bauhaus was designing from a program comes from Colin Rowe of Cornell University.

For more on this, see Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, The University of Chicago Pres.

Three statements rejecting the values of the International Style are Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , The Museum of Modern Art; Peter Blake's article, "The Folly of Modern Architecture," in The Atlantic Monthly , September 1974; and Mimi Lobell's article, "Pickin' Up the Pieces of Universal Order and Architecture," in On Site magazine, December, 1974.

The issue of how we attempt to teach architecture as value-free is complex, but it can most clearly be seen in the divorce made in design studio from history, theory, and ideology. The students are then told that they are solving abstract problems for a client with no particular cultural background.

History in most architecture schools suffered during the late 60's from the attack that it was not "relevant." Aside from various problems of 60's rhetoric, this judgment was probably true given the way history was being taught, and in most places, still is.

Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture , Penguin Books, pp. 387-388.

The most obvious example is seen in what happens to a student who presents a design for a house in first year with such middle class symbols as window shutters. After the design instructor gets through with him, he doesn't do that gain.

The use of vernacular symbols in architecture design is also lacking. The consequence can be seen in comparing a street in Disney World with the barren and desolate street on Roosevelt Island in New York, a project designed to the standards of established "modern" architecture.

Finally, the student isn't even able to se any of the symbols or forms he learns in studying the traditional monuments in Western architectural history.

See the work of B. G. Cragg and H. N. V. Temperley. Also Jagit Singh, Great Ideas in information Theory, Language, and Cybernetics , Dover.

The most famous example of this is the benzene ring which came to Kebule in a dream, but Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation , shows that this kind of contribution from the unconscious can be identified in many conceptual realizations in science.

P. 212.

Published by Braziller. Ehrenzweig's work is extremely important for understanding the workings of the mind in the arts.

Most notably Marshall McLuhan, particularly in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

Introduction to the paperback. Preceding the quote is: "Poincare once said 'Sociologists discuss sociological methods; physicists discuss physics.' I love this statement."

The role of the hand, or of "doing" in general, is unexplored in American academia. The potential is great, especially in architecture, despite attempts to make it otherwise. Tai Chi Chuan, a Chinese exercise, is also a study of Taoist philosophy with the body rather than with the mind. Scully said of Kahn: "What his mind knew, his body knew."

In part this idea derives from notions being worked on by William Katavolos.

The semantic issue of what constitutes a good designer might be raised here. However, for those who know what design is, that is know how to do it, there is no semantic problem.