Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground

Front matter

*UCLPRESS

Architecture in Dialogue with an Activated Ground

DESIGN RESEARCH IN ARCHITECTURE

Foreword

Some years ago, Thad the great pleasure of assessing Urs Bette's PhD dissertation entitled Unreasonable Creatures | in dialogue with an activated ground, which represents the core of this publication. As a matter of fact, I personally recommended Urs Bette to publish his outstanding research work, and I am very happy that a re-edited version of the original manuscript has now been included in Murray Fraser and Jonathan Hill's highly estimated 'Design Research in Architecture' book series. The defence took place in October 2014 at RMIT University's Design Hub in Melbourne as part of RMIT's progressive Research by Practice programme initiated by Professor Leon van Schaik. I have been fortunate to attend a number of RMIT's Practice Research Symposiums as an external assessor, a peer and an unofficial member of this stimulating research community now also spreading into Europe from RMIT's new hub in Barcelona.

The conducted doctoral examinations at these Practice Research Symposiums are slightly different from a conventional PhD examination format. Besides the comprehensive written document, Urs Bette also presented a live exhibition of his own work at RMIT’s gallery space. The overall research work represents a more extensive volume than the so-called Appropriate Durable

Record, which forms the backbone of this publication. This publication includes a few images from the exhibition, and I am glad that Urs Bette made the effort to compile andre-edit his composite doctoral research projectinto a format more suitable for widespread dissemination. Urs Bette's research work is in my view an important contribution to the developing discourse of research into different creative processes coveringa broad spectrum of related research topics, such as Research by Design, Research by Practice, Artistic Research and other branches of design research, to which this book series is reaching out.

There is a rich tradition of research, that is, in architectural history and architectural theory, but very little knowledge about this artistic and cultural legacy's inner creative logics, and very little investigation into the question of what spatial intelligence is and how it is being applied. Most architectural schools and universities are trainingtheir students in different procedures and best-practice methods to apply science. The often incredibly complex undertaking of 'applying art' has for some reason been regarded asa rather subjective and idiosyncratic endeavour not suitable for any scientific inquiries. A widespread view is that artistic creativity is unreliable in rational terms or at x Foreword least a singular phenomenon out of reach for any generalised knowledge, and that creative intelligence is artificial by nature and therefore ultimately fake -a synthetic thing not belonging to the real world.

I think this misconception is lacking any foresighted understanding ofthe challenges of our advanced society. We are aboutto enter a future where artificialintelligence will play a major role. We might think of this new artificial intelligence as rather robotic - a logical and algorithmically controlled kind of intelligence we as artistic practitioners have nothing to do with. However, I think it is important to oppose this simplistic and limited understanding of artificialintelligence. I happen to be an architect, and I do see this book series as an important effort to open up this discussion - and I personally believe in the future of the ‘sciences of the artificial’ as promoted by the American economist and political scientist Herbert A. Simon.

The increasing scientific interest in the nature of human creativity and the question as to whether the ‘eureka moment’ of new creative discoveries can be analysed and studied through scientific inquiries and whether there are consistent processes at play provides a backdrop for this publication. While my profession has been trying to present our society with a context of justification for applying art, we seem to have forgotten to investigate the context of discovery where serious artistic play becomes a fertile ground for its transformation into a factual product. Urs Bette addresses this oversight.

I am glad to endorse Unreasonable Creatures and happy to see the additional material included in this publication. The discussions I had with Urs Bette during his doctoral defence are recorded and stored at RMIT's research library, but my personal notes and the comments I provided in the assessment report were not intended for publication. With permission from Urs Bette, I am pleased in this foreword to include some re-edited parts of my feedback and reflections on his research.

As stated in the Introduction, the overall intent is to validate the context of discovery or, as he puts it, the 'role of the unreasonable' in architectural design processes. The validation of this general intention is carried out by different measures throughout the book and becomes both an oculus for Urs Bette's investigation of his own methodological approach, as wellasan overall framework for what I see as the main contribution to knowledge - a lucid demonstration of how a specific artistic context of discovery can be linked inasynergism with a rational and general consensus-based context of justification.

Through his own work, Urs Bette examinesandelucidates how his creative process fluctuates between irrational/intuitive progressions and rational/objective steps of justification - and how he deliberately uses different representational tools to ‘make sense' within these apparently separate epistemological realms. He is not using the established terms 'context of discovery' and 'context of justification' in his endeavour. Instead, he speaks about dialectics between 'form-space' and 'form-meaning', which he relates to an investigation of the morphological evolution of the 'object-oriented ontology' of his work.

Time=now

1.1 Boris Brorman Jensen, Three ideograms | illustrating the author’s cognitive schemata, Aarhus, Denmark 2018, © Boris Brorman Jensen xi Foreword

Time=now

Prehistory

The morphological evolution at play in his creative processes is recorded through self-reflective mental mappings and physical model studies. The progression or morphological evolution is characterised by four steps: field, figure, character and dissection. Through these four steps, Urs Bette illustrates (1) how a transcendent field of ideas first encounters a site and (2) thereby turns into an immanent figure, then (3) further advances into a more

Figure Field

Character

Biographical background matured architectural character accommodated by an activated ground, which finally (4) can be dissected as an architectural object in order to detect and test its relations with interior spaces.

The layers of insight stipulated in the research work are manifold. Beside a stringent introspective analysis of the trajectory of a whole career and an in-depth description ofthe creative processes immanent in the body of work, Urs Bette offersa xii Foreword wide range of critical perspectives on both contemporary practices and the profession asa whole. He also provides a lucid demonstration of how creative inventions become applied art or architecture per se asa result of being conveyed back and forth between two opposing modes of assessment: emotive cognition and intellectual synthesis. By forcing his Unreasonable Creatures beyond the 'eureka moment' into a synergic loop between the two dissimilar epistemological realms - 'form as space' and 'form as meaning' - he provides evidence for the use of post rationalisations as a productive engine in creative processes.

The three ideograms (see fig. 1.1) are my personal interpretation of the three cognitive schemata or meta-structures used by Urs Bette in his self-reflective autobiography.

The first ideogram represents a simple indexical knowledge offered in the Appendix. Here, the different projects are sorted in a timeline with one temporal distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’ establishing an independent practice, while at the same time he categorises projects according to rational parameters such as program, size, client and the author's role in the process.

The second ideogram represents a layered knowledge developed in the Coinage chapters indicating the existence of a coherent trajectory of autonomous authorship supplemented by a narrated autobiography suggesting a possible periodisation of the body of work. Included in this layered knowledge is also a prehistory connecting the mature artistic production with an early pre-professional understanding of objects in space.

The third ideogram represents an expanded transversal knowledge emerging in the fourth chapter Agents. Here, Urs Bette identifies and links relapsing dynamics in the creative discoveries' iterative processes, providing a kind of second-order pattern by dropping the hardto-question autobiographic narrative into the background - and thereby providing a methodological knowledge recorded outside personal circumstances.

Boris Brorman Jensen