The Brick Wall

If we make the loose analogy that the act of building is similar to language, we quickly turn to comparing building components, the brick, wall ties, flashing, walls, etc to grammar and syntax. To extend this further, we could paraphrase a Wittgensteinian question: "What would the brick wall be, without the wall?" Is it just a brick? or is there something between the brick and the wall that changes it, and like a 'wink' with multiple possible meanings, transforms the combination in context into something else.

Definitions and Experience

Intuition tells us that culturally we develop new words when there is a need for expression. But linguistics and ethnography shows us that we "express" ideas in more ways than just using nouns. As human beings, we communicate feelings and ideas in a number of ways, using an infinitely complex system of grammar, syntax, inflection, body language, context etc. Put another way, a culture doesn't need a specific word to express an idea or feeling, it can express it in other ways. Conversely, just because someone else uses the same actual word, such as "house" it doesn't mean it represents the same idea or feeling for everyone. In fact despite what Aristotle thought about the solidity of writing, words rarely mean the same thing to different individuals even within a culture.

Creating versus Making

Collingwood in his book "The Principals of Art" attacks the modern (circa 1933) concept of the artist as craftsman. The characteristics of craft he defines as:

1. Craft always involves a distinction between means and end, each clearly conceived as something distinct from the other


2. Craft involves a distinction between planning and execution


3. Means and ends are related in one way in the process of planning; in the opposite in the process of execution.


4. There is a distinction between raw material and finished product or artifact


5. There is a distinction between form and matter
   
6. There is a hierarchical relation between various crafts, on supplying what another needs, one using what another provides.
   

Through an analysis of the concept of craft and its related notion of technique, Collingwood calls into question the prevailing conceptual models based on economics (the specialized group of industries where the artist is the producer and audience is a consumer) or psychology (audience consists of persons reacting to certain stimuli provided by the artist) based conceptual models). These world views, which have craft as an underlying assumption, defines art as a made product, which is a finished, complete totality.

Art, Collingwood claims is not made, it is created and is an unrealized process which, through the imagination, must be re-created each time it in comes into being.

Parallel Objects

If form, to paraphrase Riegl, was the exterior expression of its internal structure, then who or what put that "will to form" in place? Is not the sub-structure of a work of art a subjective architecture built on the complex psycho-stylistic (style, used here in a morphological sense) process of personal and cultural contexts? To put it more bluntly, can form exist by itself? Is not form as much a product of the viewer as it is of the forms that surround it?

The accerlation of form

If form, like language is a result from the form that surrounds it, from the people who have to technically create it, or reproduce it, then at what point do we consider form to have a life of its own? Form then becomes not a static, stationary single act of individual creation, but a social act. Form produces itself. In one since it is analogous to the "standing on the shoulders of giants" metaphor for the progression of science and philosophy.

Seen this way, we can speak of slow form and accelerated form. Slow form is that which because of the technology or culture which surround it, make it singular in nature and hard to reproduce. If only the exceptionally gifted villager can make it, or it exists in a location where only a few people can see it, then it can only affect the forms which surround it in a limited way. It may impress in a tangential way, but will be seen as a rarity. This is also true if for cultural reasons the surrounding form ignores it (a good example of this is the introduction and subsequent rejection of linear perspective in 17th century China).

Accelerated form on the other hand is widely seen, and easily produced. It rapidly affects form, and is affected by it. It tends to be both short lived and paradoxically cyclical, or re-accruing. Accelerated form, is almost by definition, modern form, specifically machine-age form, mass-produced in the thousands and disseminated across a wide area.

In the age of the computer we have reached a new stage of form, fast form, or virtual form.

Linguistics, Kubler and a Tyranny of Form

The first time I read George Kubler's "The Shape of Time" I didn't like it. The idea that objects had a life of their own, fully independent of the their creator was interesting but somehow not acceptable to a 5th year architectural student. Furthermore the questions which I used to eviscerate Kubler's argument came easily:

• Did not the artist/creator have control over the ideas and objects that he/she produces?


• Kubler's formalism which suggests that I am bound to the past, implicitly states that I can only create based on what has come before. Does not the wide expanse of my imagination have complete freedom over the things I create? Which objects or persons 'tell' me what I think about or imagine?


• Maybe Kubler's theory was correct for art before the Avant Guarde, perhaps before the Impressionist abstractions, but not now? If anything contemporary art is existentially about the new, the different.
  

Kubler was interesting in understanding art history, Kubler was after all a Mesoamerican scholar, but modern art, not so much.

Then while studying linguistics, I discovered that language changes in a fairly predictable way and that it too has a 'life of its own' relatively independent of the culture or people that use it.

Outside of linguists there is a myth that language reflects the culture of its speakers. It does to a certain extent but for the most part why a culture speaks its language is arbitrary. For example, languages are affected more by which languages surround it and how many people have to learn it as adults than any forced cultural manipulation. Sure new words are created or existing semantics broaden to express culturally important ideas, but the structure, grammar and sounds of a language have little reflection on the culture which uses it. Language morphology (or form based change patterns) is so consistent, perpetual and culturally irrelevant, that through the study of related languages one can determine their age and the migration patterns of its speakers. To some extent one can even recreate the original dead language in which it evolved from.

Somehow, the idea that form might follow parallel tendencies might not be so far fetched; so much for being in control.

Linguistics

Architecture has many parallels with linguists- the Pattern Language's architecture-by-numbers not included http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language). One of the most interesting, I think, is how linguistics's existential question (what is language) has played upon the very scholarly field which asks it. Consumed by what Freud called a "Narcissism of Little differences", the experience of language and the study of it are two different things.

Before I go further, let me stress that I am in no way advocating the advantages of being 'dumb' about language (and by extension Architecture). I strongly believe that the study of a subject enriches our understanding and experience of it. By understanding the variety in languages we develop a new perspective on our own language(s). The preconceptions of expression and communication that are inherent to the language we use can be exposed, confronted, explored with fresh eyes. The question: "How does the language I use predetermine how I view the world?" can be asked.

For example, there are 'click' languages, spoken in Southern Africa, (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE5D61731F93BA25750C0A9659C8B63)

that use clicks to change a word's meaning just like vowels or consonants do in English. There are languages in Australia that only have 3 verbs and there are languages, like Yupik Eskimo, that combine an entire sentence into one word. ("The Story of Human Language", John McWhorter, The Teaching Company. 2004) To understand how tonal languages developed (Chinese) or where grammar words evolved from is akin to taking a trip to a new country and learning for the first time, that life can be lived in another way, totally foreign from your own.