freedom and architectural design

Freedom is doing what you want to do. However, you have to be careful about what you want. Before you know it you are throwing away your freedom by doing things which end up enslaving you or show you to be the slave of your worst animal drives. That is surely no freedom! For Immanuel Kant to be free is to determine your own end and to live subject to a law you give yourself. That begs the question: Which are good ends to pursue and what kind of law would you freely impose upon yourself as a human being and a designer? Probably, I would guess, ones you- or someone you trust has thought very carefully about. We feel happy enough subjecting ourselves to the laws of a community as long as we feel they are reasonable, fair and benefit us. Our whole upbringing is geared to finding and getting used to useful rules to live, love and work by. And at university, just before we are launched into the rest of our lives, we consequently assume that everything we do needs to be appropriately justified. This course is an exercise in justification. Design is free. You can design anything in any way you want to. That is where the problems start. Freedom in design is important, but also very difficult to deal with. Freedom in design consists in designing according to criteria of judgement that we have thought carefully about and we willingly impose upon ourselves.

Architecture is the product of a continuous creative process resulting in what we might call an architectural event.  An architectural event is the moment some person undergoes a building or a space through use of it in whatever way. To arrive at this event we need a building to undergo. Buildings are the product of refined a technology evolved over time and realised with the help of a prescriptive process of design and facture using various materials and techniques of making. These coupled and integrated processes attempt to realise hoped for qualities in the final work which can be broadly summarised by stability, comfort, convenience and enjoyment. Then, as a counterpoint for this productive process there is the body which needs to undergo the building: the bodily experience that constitutes the architectural event. This could be seen as a descriptive creativity. One improves one’s undergoing of a building, through spatial exercise and the practise of one’s judgment. To extend one’s experience in undergoing spaces well is in fact a form of virtual designing and making. It is a redesigning and remaking of the building in one’s bodily experience.  These strands of the creative process braid into a continuous experience and they learn from the other. Comparing notes makes our approach to the design task more sophisticated and more fluently aligned to the way people have found ways to use and experience spaces. The architect acquires knowledge skills and an appropriate attitude by practicing his design as well as by becoming what we might call spatially refined or athletic. In this way, it is hoped, she will design buildings that help society do what it needs to do, give us all a good place to reside and do what we want to do.

Immanuel Kant asked himself three basic questions: What do we know? How should we act? And, what do we dare hope for? Taken together these questions explore the architect’s engagement with society and his or her power to design well. After all, the architect makes things that order our world. Making and ordering is done on the basis of our experience, on the basis of what we think we know. We undertake these activities with the idea that it is right that we do things in this way and finally, we do it in the hope that something good will come of it. The project of philosophy is essentially architectural, a fact that was not lost on Kant. The philosopher describes, through simulation, the landscape of reality as best as he can. On this he builds his house of thought, which has to be firm, comfortable, convenient and enjoyable. In that house he designs the machinery of his actions. At the same time the architect is someone who makes our image of the world and makes the world habitable. That constitutes something of a responsibility. This course seeks to explore the intimate relationship between architecture and philosophy by examining the grounds of our ability to judge designs and justify design decisions from the perspectives of four of the main philosophical movements of the twentieth century: phenomenology, pragmatism, existentialism and transcendental empiricism. Each lecture will be concerned with the presentation of a thought-string. Sometimes a specific problem will take centre stage at other times a thinker or a movement. During each lecture we shall be looking at three things: the landscape or context in which the thinking takes place, the architecture of the thought and the mechanics of action that the thought appears to suggest. All this with reference to concrete examples from the world of design in architecture.

This course seeks to explore the intimate relationship between architecture and philosophy by examining the grounds of our ability to judge designs and justify design decisions from the perspectives of four of the main philosophical movements of the twentieth century: phenomenology, pragmatism, existentialism and transcendental empiricism. Each lecture will be concerned with the presentation of a biography of a thought-string. Sometimes a specific problem will take centre stage at other times a thinker or a movement. During each lecture we shall be looking at three things: the landscape or context in which the thinking takes place, the architecture of the thought and the mechanics of action that the thought appears to suggest. All this with reference to concrete examples from the world of design in architecture..