Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
Because the approach to the room is along a long corridor, the attentive visitor might at first think that three light squares had been affixed to the windows or, as one gradually came closer, that the tinting of the windows had simply been removed in these three lighter near-square areas. Davies continues: "only at this point do the other senses kick in. The visitor begins first to hear and smell the ocean and then to actually feel the outside air entering the gallery; this sensory experience is in complete contradiction to the faulty first impression."
One of the responsibilities for an architect is to provide a space that is usable and enhances the possibilities for what you do. But mostly, museums are just the opposite; they're horrible spaces, anti-art, they can't be used. They can't function, they overwhelm it. So in a way, they become objects in themselves many times, almost sculptures, and they get a lot of aggrandizement out of it...In terms of Bilbao, the one difference there is that they did not really want a museum, they wanted a monument. They wanted a thing that would bring people to the Bilbao.
Lawrence Weschler:
The red, for example, wasn't simply red – or rather it was: the surface was covered over in a completely even gloss of lipstick red paint – but (had it been doing that before?) the panel was reflecting ambient conditions like crazy, so much so that in fact almost none of the surface, strictly speaking, was red. Pool-like, it was reflecting the yellow ceiling panel beyond, whose own color was in turn being affected by the blue floor piece beyond that. There were purple effects and green, a sort of even bruise-brown hovering over the entire array when one now viewed the gallery from the side.
In order: Kenny Price, Blue Lou, Legacy, Fourfold, Niagara.
Irwin has explained that he decided to use the fluorescent tubes in the "dumbest" way possible, but, as one critic cautioned, "dumb, it turns out, has a special meaning for him: It's a form so simple that you end up not paying attention to it as a form." Irwin's interest was, rather, in the range of light, color, reflection, and shadow interaction made possible by combining tubes with different hues and finishes by wrapping them with theatrical gels.
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
I'd been talking about this idea of a conditional art for a very long time, and what I did was actually accomplish it, the idea that there was not a normal structure to it, that every decision had to be intuitive or instinctual or tactile. You decide to go this way or that way, but there was no beginning, no middle, and no end and so there's no hierarchical structure to it at all. And at the end of it, I mean, after you wander for a while, you just ended it yourself because there was no solution to it.
Photographs of 5 Openings 2 + 3, Untitled, and Double Diamond.
Black Line Volume, String Line-Light Volume, Corridor String Piece, Line Rectangle
"The resultant black rectangle was not what you "looked at" – there was actually nothing to focus on – but soon it brought the space into focus with a distinct visual snap. From inside, the light in the area seemed different, more substantial, and the wall color began to shift ambiguously. From outside the area, the tape seemed to lift the plane of the floor upward in your field of vision, and it also made the room seem wider and shallower than it really was." — Roberta Smith
"Quality is only there," Irwin explained, "if you pursue it all the way to the last bolt." Consequently, how joints are finished must be specified in the contract. "And believe me," he added ruefully from experience, "there is a real discrepancy here. The difference [in] how we interpret the word finish or this word quality is really disparate."
"When you bring them in and get them to be part of it," he noted, "the workmen themselves start to take pride in it. And when they start taking that pride in this idea of quality, ...it starts becoming theirs, something important to them, that they in fact do know what we are talking about."
I know some people are going to say: "Hey! That's Dan Flavin's act. Why in the hell is Irwin doing a Dan Flavin? Why is he suddenly so inconsistent – fluorescent one day and Cor-Ten the next?" The key to all of this is that we have to examples what we mean by consistency. And here the critical question is: "what do we use to measure consistency with?" If you measure consistency in terms of material, or gesture, then I will be found inconsistent. But, in all of the recent pieces and proposals, if you go to the actual site and look at it, you will find that the solution is absolutely consistent on the grounds within which it responds to its environment. This in turn is consistent with my development of the implications implicit in non-object art.
Irwin also included as part of the expanding network of aesthetic experiences radiating out from the museum a series of what he termed "incidental" sculptures, or phenomena of perceptual interest...
"Continuing Responses" began formally in the museum as a series of situations in direct response to the already existing spaces and their uses. At first easily accessible but then moving to consider more and more those previously unacknowledged and covert events. This project now moves outside the museum beginning with a window of the museum and then to include a series of "concrete" and "incidental sculptures" on sites throughout Fort Work and vicinity. These responses already number twenty-five and are referenced by a map of locations in the lobby of the museum.
I tilt the room just enough, the space just enough that you may not be able to use your normal mode of placing yourself in that space, forcing you for one second to make a perceptual read and become aware that you are the perceiver and that all information comes through that perceptual act and that when you walk out of there, ...if you take that with you, you will begin to see things everywhere around you and that you are the one that is changed and you are there and that is what changed things.
I cannot perceive for you. I can conceive for you and we can then in a sense hold a general agreement about quality of conception and we may all operate under it and that's what is known as a common agreement. But the area of perceiving as such is totally individual, there's no way that we carry it in that sense.
This is not an antisocial gesture; it is in fact a highly ethical one, since trying to get another person to see what and how you see has the potential to become a violation of the other's own autonomy:
There is nothing more unethical than having ambitions for someone else's mind.
Someone said to me the other day that there's nothing really ever new. That everything really repeats itself, you know, is repeating itself all the time, and they were showing me a Carl Andrew and they were also showing me some aborigine art and there really was a very strong similarity. And so I got to thinking about it and it came to me that if everything is really repeating itself constantly and that there's nothing ever really new...at the same time it's equally true that nothing is ever exactly the same. That everything is different every single time even though it's repeated constantly and all the same things keep passing through. They're never exactly the same so that the nature of change is not about something wholly new. It's actually about the subtlest slightest kinds of differences.
The column essentially disappeared into the space. It was there but it wasn't. As you walked around the room, suddenly, it might flash. Or, because I'd notched a little facet along one side, there might appear, for just an instant, a single white line, or a thin black glint.
The column was an indication of my wanting to get out and treat the environment itself, I don't mean in the sense of building buildings or being an architect, but rather of dealing with the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel – all those semi-intangible things that we don't normally deal with.
Irwin had begun his disc paintings with what, in retrospect, he described as a simple question: "How do I paint a painting that does not begin and end at an edge but rather starts to take in and become involved with the space or environment around it?"
Artwork and detail.
I took the surface of the canvas and curved it slightly in all directions, so slightly that you did not see it as being curved, but sensed its added physicality...The beauty of it for me was that you were not aware of it first as an idea, but only aware of it on this tactile level.
Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.
For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:
he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.
A case study of the working methods of one particularly successful designer in a highly competitive design domain - Formula One racing car design. Gordon Murray was chief designer for the very successful Brabham and McLaren racing car teams in the 1970s and 1980s. His record of success is characterised by innovative breakthroughs, often arising as sudden illuminations, based on considering the task from first principles and from a systemic viewpoint. His working methods are highly personal, and include intensive use of drawings. Personality factors and team management abilities also appear to be relevant. There are some evident similarities with some other successful, innovative designers
Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, ‘Given the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.’
In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he ‘used to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.’
That's what is great about race car design, because even though you've had the big idea - the “light bulb” thing, which is fun - the real fun is actually taking these individual things, that nobody's every done before, and in no time at all try and think of a way of designing them. And not only think of a way of doing them, but drawing the bits, having them made and testing them.
Gordon Murray insists on keeping experience 'at the back of your mind, not the front' and to work from first principles when designing. For instance, in designing a component such as a suspension wishbone, 'it's all too easy - and the longer you're in design the easier it is - to say, I know all about wishbones, this is how it's going to look because that's what wishbones look like.' But if you want to make a step forward, if you're looking for ways of making it much better and much lighter, than you have to go right back to load path analysis. It is like designing things for the first time, rather than the nth time.
Working from first principles, and working in a highly organized way seem to come naturally to him, but his personal design process is much less structured than the results might suggest. Although he can tightly organize his team and run a complex racing organisation, his personal ways of designing are relatively unstructured, based on annotated, thumb-nail sketches. ‘I don't sit down and say, OK, now I've had the idea, let's see, this is a solution, these are the different ways to go, if I do this, and do that; I do lots of scribbles just to save it, before I forget.’
Gordon’s design process is based on starting with a quick sketch of a whole idea, which is then developed through many different refinements. ‘I do a quick sketch of the whole idea, and then if there's one bit that looks good, instead of rubbing other bits out, I'd put that bit to one side; I'd do it again and expand on the good bit, and drop out the bad bit, and keep doing it, doing it; and end up with all these sketches, and eventually you end up throwing ninety percent of these away.’ He also talks to himself - or rather, writes notes to himself on the sketches; notes such as ‘rubbish’, ‘too heavy’ or ‘move it this way 30mm.’ Eventually he gets to the stage of more formal, orthographic drawings, but still drawing annotated plans, elevations and sections all together, ‘Until at the end of the day the guys at Brabham used to call them “Wonder Plots”, because they used to say “It's a wonder anybody could see what was on them”!’
Although Gordon Murray carried immense personal responsibility for the design work of his racing cars, inevitably it involved a lot of teamwork. Clearly he has been successful in inspiring others to work with him. He likes to involve team members in the design problems, and for that reason prefers to recruit all-rounders to his team; ‘I never have engineers that aren't designers.’
He also likes to work collectively, standing around a drawing board discussing problems and trying ideas.
For this kind of teamwork, and especially for conceptual design work, he finds computer aided design systems too restrictive. For the McLaren F1 super-car, he installed a five-metre long drawing board in the design office, so that the car could be drawn full size. ‘The problem with CAD for this sort of stuff is that you can never have a full-size drawing, unless you do a print, and by the time you do a print it's out of date in the concept stage.’ He also does not like the one-person emphasis of CAD screens; ‘You can only ever talk to one person at once - you stand behind and look over somebody's shoulder, which is not very good for a boss-designer relationship anyway, to have somebody standing behind you is never a good thing. To look over somebody's shoulder at a tiny little screen, it's just wrong, it's totally wrong.’
(On the other hand, he fully acknowledges that tasks like a complex suspension plot to determine the wheel envelope are ideal for CAD.)
Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’
The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool.
The innovator has a systems mind, one that sees things in terms of how they relate to each other in producing a result, a new gestalt that to some degree changes the world.
The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.
The working methods of the innovative designer are, for the most part, not systematic; there is little or no evidence of the use of systematic methods of creative thinking, for example. The innovative designer seems to be too involved with the urgent necessity of problem solving to want, or to need, to stand back and consider their working methods. Their design approach is strategic, not tactical.
An important feature of their strategy is parallel working - keeping design activity going at many levels simultaneously. The best cognitive aid for supporting and maintaining parallel design thinking is drawing. Drawing with the conventional tools of paper and pencil gives the flexibility to shift levels of detail instantaneously; allows partial, different views at different levels of detail to be developed side by side, or above and below and overlapping; keeps records of previous views, ideas and notes that can be accessed relatively quickly and inserted into the current frame of reference; permits and encourages the simultaneous, non-hierarchical participation of co-workers, using a common representation.
The drawing of partial solutions or representations also aids the designer’s thinking processes, and provides some ‘talk-back’. As well as drawing, innovative designers frequently like to undertake practical work related to the design solution, such as building models or mock-ups, or participating in construction.
The innovative designer also likes, perhaps needs, to work with a small team of committed co-workers who share the same passions and dedication.