Juhani Pallasmaa / The Worlds of Art and Science

The Worlds of Art and Science

Reality and Experience in Architecture and Art

Juhani Pallasmaa

Gas­ton Bachelard was a philoso­pher of sci­ence until his mid-life, when he came to the con­clu­sion that sci­ence does not — and can­not — say any­thing mean­ing­ful about the real­i­ty of lived life, the human life world and its exis­ten­tial mean­ings. This is the realm of sen­so­ry encounters, 

lived expe­ri­ences and emo­tions, and it can be artic­u­lat­ed and medi­at­ed only through artis­tic and poet­ic imagery. After this dra­mat­ic shift in his inter­est from sci­ence to poet­ics, Bachelard wrote sig­nif­i­cant books on the poet­ic imageries of air, water, earth and fire, as well as on dreams and rever­ies, and the imag­i­na­tion of mat­ter. His book The Poet­ics of Space (1958)1 became one of the most influ­en­tial books in the archi­tec­tur­al dis­course of the past half a cen­tu­ry. The con­tin­ued inter­est in Bachelard’s phi­los­o­phy of poet­ic imagery reflects a yearn­ing for the men­tal dimen­sions of build­ing, which the dom­i­nance of pro­fes­sion­al­ist ratio­nal­i­ty in the prac­tice of archi­tec­ture tends to elim­i­nate. The threat­ened dimen­sion is the exis­ten­tial mean­ing, its men­tal con­tent and the medi­a­tion between our­selves and the world.

Alto­geth­er, the qua­si-ratio­nal­i­ty of our cul­ture tends to wipe away men­tal mean­ings, not to speak of the spir­i­tu­al dimen­sions. Human cul­ture has deviced three par­al­lel approach­es for the aspi­ra­tion of mean­ing in the world and our exis­tence in it: reli­gion (and myth), sci­ence and art. The first seeks mean­ing through faith and pri­mor­dial expe­ri­ence, the sec­ond through ratio­nal knowl­edge, and the third through sen­so­ry and emo­tion­al encounter. These three realms are inde­pen­dent paths of search, which can­not be fused into each oth­er, and I intend to focus on the bound­ary and inter­ac­tions of the worlds of sci­ence and art in.

Two Domains and Opposite Directions

In his intrigu­ing book The Phi­los­o­phy of No: A Phi­los­o­phy of the New Sci­en­tif­ic Mind 2, writ­ten in 1949 at the time when his inter­ests were begin­ning to shift from sci­ence to art, Bachelard explains the devel­op­ment of sci­en­tif­ic thought as a grad­ual tran­si­tion from ani­mism through real­ism, pos­i­tivism, ratio­nal­ism and com­plex ratio­nal­ism to dialec­ti­cal ratio­nal­ism.3 This is the closed orbit of sci­en­tif­ic thought in Bachelard’s view. The philo­soph­i­cal evo­lu­tion of a spe­cial piece of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge is a move­ment through all these doc­trines in the order indi­cat­ed”, the philoso­pher argues.4

William H Gass, the Amer­i­can logi­cian-philoso­pher-writer (1924 ‑2017) once sug­gest­ed inter­est­ing­ly that the arts devel­op along the same route as sci­ence, but in the oppo­site direc­tion away from ratio­nal, ana­lyt­ic and con­cep­tu­al knowl­edge back towards an ani­mistic encounter, exis­ten­tial knowl­edge and an embod­ied iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the world.5 This image of sci­ence and art mov­ing along the same path of human con­scious­ness to oppo­site direc­tions is thought-pro­vok­ing and worth remem­ber­ing when dis­cussing the inter­changes between neu­ro­science and archi­tec­ture, for instance, a widen­ing inter­est today. In our cur­rent cul­ture, which is unde­ni­ably devel­op­ing away from the nat­ur­al, eco­log­i­cal and lived sense of real­i­ty towards an increas­ing­ly fab­ri­cat­ed and manip­u­lat­ed expe­ri­ence, art desires to turn back towards life and the lived real­i­ty, its forces and process­es, away from the world of exces­sive ratio­nal­i­sa­tion and con­cep­tu­al­i­sa­tion. Artis­tic imagery works its way from the cere­bral and ana­lyt­ic under­stand­ing back towards a myth­i­cal, exis­ten­tial and ani­mistic grasp of the world and an indi­vid­ual men­tal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with it.

Sci­ence evolves and com­mu­ni­cates through ideation­al con­cepts and ratio­nal argu­men­ta­tion, where­as art address­es our bod­i­ly and men­tal being direct­ly with lived images with­out con­cepts, def­i­n­i­tions and proofs. Col­in St John Wil­son, the archi­tect of the British Library in Lon­don, describes this non-ideation­al and embod­ied lan­guage vivid­ly: It is as if I am being manip­u­lat­ed by some sub­lim­i­nal code, not to be trans­lat­ed into words, which acts direct­ly on the ner­vous sys­tem and imag­i­na­tion, at the same time stir­ring inti­ma­tions of mean­ing with spa­tial expe­ri­ences as though they were one thing. It is my belief that the code acts so direct­ly and vivid­ly upon us because it is strange­ly famil­iar; it is in fact the first lan­guage we ever learned, long before words, and which is now recalled to us through art, which alone holds the key to revive it”6

Where­as sci­en­tif­ic thought pro­gress­es and dif­fer­en­ti­ates, artis­tic thought seeks to return back to an undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed and expe­ri­en­tial­ly uni­fied, ocean­ic under­stand­ing of the world. Artis­tic imag­i­na­tion seeks expres­sions that medi­ate the com­plex­i­ties of human expe­ri­en­tial encoun­ters with the world through lived poet­ic images. They medi­ate com­plete exis­ten­tial expe­ri­ences. If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flow­ers, his paint­ings are win­dows, which are open on the whole world”, Jean-Paul Sartre writes.7 The para­dox­i­cal task of fus­ing sin­gu­lar­i­ties and uni­ver­sal­i­ties is achieved through embod­ied images that are expe­ri­enced and lived rather than rea­soned and under­stood. It is painful to look at Tizian’s paint­ing Flay­ing of Marsyas (1570), in which Marsyas the Satyr is skinned alive in Apollo’s revenge. The view­er feels his own skin being pealed off; this is a force­ful bod­i­ly iden­ti­fi­ca­tion char­ac­ter­is­tic to artis­tic expe­ri­ence. We do not just watch or lis­ten to a piece of art, it becomes part of our very being. The fact that we are moved by the cave paint­ings near­ly thir­ty thou­sand years after their con­cep­tion, is a proof of the mag­ic pow­er, the per­pet­u­al now­ness and per­sis­tence of art. An artist is worth a thou­sand cen­turies”, Paul Valéry, the poet, declares8, and the old­est rock art in Africa and Aus­tralia is already approach­ing the half age of the poet’s pre­dic­tion. Jorge Luis Borges sug­gests an even longer time per­spec­tive for artis­tic qual­i­ty: Beau­ty con­nects us with the eter­nal”9.

Our qua­si-ratio­nal mate­ri­al­ist and dis­en­chant­ed cul­ture pri­or­i­tizes cere­bral under­stand­ing and knowl­edge over intu­ition and feel­ing, and regards sci­ence as a medi­a­tor of unques­tion­able and ver­i­fied facts and truths, where­as art is com­mon­ly under­stood to con­vey mere sub­jec­tiv­i­ties, emo­tions and sen­so­ry plea­sures. Con­sumer cul­ture even tends to regard art as mere cul­tur­al enter­tain­ment and spec­ta­cle. This dichoto­my dis­ap­pears, how­ev­er, when we real­ize and accept that sci­ence and art are engaged in dif­fer­ent dimen­sions of real­i­ty. The first inves­ti­ga­tion takes place in the world out­side of our­selves (even in the case of the sci­ences of the human mind and the neur­al realm, the phe­nom­e­na are stud­ied out­side and sep­a­rate from our­selves as unique, liv­ing indi­vid­u­als), the lat­ter direct­ly in our expe­ri­en­tial, embod­ied and men­tal real­i­ty, as well as the realms of mem­o­ry, imag­i­na­tion and empathy. 

Real­i­ty is anoth­er com­plex and arguable notion. Gior­gio Moran­di, the painter of meta­phys­i­cal still-lifes, sug­gests pro­vok­ing­ly: Noth­ing is more abstract than real­i­ty”10. Here the painter points at the com­plex­i­ty and fun­da­men­tal­ly mys­te­ri­ous nature of the con­cept and expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty. The same can be said about the notion of time. The force­ful devel­op­ment of con­sumerist cul­ture is mak­ing the con­cept of real­i­ty ambigu­ous. J.G. Bal­lard, the writer of the best-sell­ing nov­el Crash, makes an inter­est­ing com­ment on the altered real­i­ty of our time. He argues that the rela­tion of fic­tion and real­i­ty is in the process of bee­ing up-end­ed. As we live increas­ing­ly in tech­nol­o­gized, eco­nom­ic, social, and aes­thet­ic fic­tions, the task of the writer is not any longer to invent fic­tion. Fic­tions are already here, Bal­lard sug­gests, and the writer’s task is now to re-invent real­i­ty.11 Even the phys­i­cal set­tings of our tech­nol­o­gized con­sumer cul­ture are loos­ing their sense of the real as they turn increas­ing­ly fic­ti­tious, aes­theti­cized, unre­al and dream­like; just think of the ghost­like struc­tures in our cities wrapped in opaque coloured glass, and total­ly with­out any exis­ten­tial mean­ing. We are liv­ing in delib­er­ate­ly fab­ri­cat­ed stage sets for con­sumerist life, devoid of mean­ing. The dimen­sion of archi­tec­ture, which is espe­cial­ly endan­gered today is its exis­ten­tial mean­ing, the men­tal con­tent in its expe­ri­ence. The task of archi­tec­ture has nev­er before in his­to­ry been reduced to util­i­ty and econ­o­my, as its pri­ma­ry task has always been to medi­ate the human rela­tion­ship with the world, between the gods and the mor­tals. As a con­se­quence of this devel­op­ment towards the unre­al, the task of the archi­tect in strength­en­ing our sense of the real, is as cru­cial as that of the writer. Our duty is to invent – or re-invent — a humane, exis­ten­tial­ly mean­ing­ful and dig­ni­fy­ing real­i­ty, that is capa­ble of con­tin­ue­ing the human saga.

Rationalising Architecture

Ever since the Renais­sance time, there have been repeat­ed efforts to turn archi­tec­ture from an artis­tic and cul­tur­al craft into a sci­en­tif­ic prac­tice and a ful­ly ratio­nal­ized oper­a­tion, based on a the­o­ret­i­cal ground, mea­sur­able facts, and ratio­nal meth­ods. Renais­sance the­o­ries believed that through giv­ing archi­tec­ture a math­e­mat­i­cal ground by means of asso­ci­at­ing it with the Pythagore­an the­o­ry of musi­cal har­mo­ny, this goal could be achieved. Indeed, in the Renais­sance era, archi­tec­ture became rec­og­nized in the quadriv­i­um of the math­e­mat­i­cal arts” along with arith­metic (the study of num­bers), geom­e­try (the study of spa­tial rela­tion­ships), astron­o­my (the study of the motions of celes­tial bod­ies), and music (the study of the motions appre­hend­ed by the ear).12

At the time of the Enlight­ment sys­tem­at­ic attempts to turn archi­tec­ture into pure and pre­dictable ratio­nal­i­ty emerged through the vocab­u­lary and syn­tax of a pre-deter­mined lan­guage of build­ing types. This is exem­pli­fied by Jacques-Nico­las-Louis Durand’s Sys­tem of Archi­tec­tur­al Ele­ments. Alber­to Pérez-Gómez describes Durand´s inten­tion in Pré­cis des Leçons d´Architecture (1819): Because archi­tec­ture was the most expen­sive of all the arts, it should not be whim­si­cal or guid­ed by prej­u­dice or rou­tine. In order to avoid waste­ful expense, archi­tec­tur­al design had to fol­low close­ly total­ly ratio­nal and immutable rules”.13

Today there is a per­sis­tent line of think­ing that wants to reduce archi­tec­ture into per­for­mance, econ­o­my and aes­theti­cized image. This approach nec­es­sar­i­ly implies the loss of poet­ic and exis­ten­tial mean­ing, and the reduc­tion of archi­tec­tur­al prac­tice into a mere ser­vice pro­fes­sion sat­is­fy­ing only the desires of clients and investors.

The ear­ly Func­tion­al­ist the­o­ries of the 1920s and 30s also pre­sent­ed efforts of turn­ing archi­tec­ture into a ratio­nal­ized prac­tice. Hannes Meyer’s ultra-mate­ri­al­ist equa­tion ARCHITECTURE = FUNCTION x ECONOMICS demon­strates the extreme reduc­tivist view, which is increas­ing­ly seen as a tar­get again today.14 Yet, Meyer’s own cre­ative tal­ent gave rise to such pas­sion­ate­ly charged archi­tec­tur­al projects as the Peter­schule of 1926 in Basel, sug­gest­ing that in his design work Mey­er was him­self guid­ed by artis­tic desires and intu­itions rather than his ratio­nal­ist the­o­ries. The same has to be said of the touch­ing­ly humane and opti­mistic build­ings of ear­ly Func­tion­al­ism, in gen­er­al. Mod­ern archi­tec­ture was alto­geth­er inspired and guid­ed by ideas of mod­ern art just as much as by any oper­a­tional the­o­ries or sci­en­tif­ic views. It all began in paint­ing”, Alvar Aal­to con­fessed, and revealed that his leg­endary Vil­la Mairea (1938−39) was inspired by spa­tial and for­mal ideas in mod­ern paint­ing.15 The sep­a­ra­tion of archi­tec­ture from its con­nec­tions with the realm of the arts and human men­tal para­me­ters is exem­pli­fied by today’s fas­ci­na­tion with algo­rith­mic, dig­i­tal­ized and evi­dence based design. At the same time that the ana­lyt­ic inter­est is wel­come, it projects a dis­trust in man’s intu­itive, imag­i­na­tive and empath­ic capac­i­ties, the ground of the arts… 

As under­stood in phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, the out­er and the inner, the mate­r­i­al and the men­tal, con­sti­tute a con­tin­u­um, and archi­tec­ture is unavoid­ably part of our men­tal real­i­ty. Built struc­tures express our very human­i­ty and its his­toric­i­ty. They should not be dealt with as exter­nal and neu­tral objects or util­i­tar­i­an and instru­men­tal issues out­side of our­selves and the real­i­ties of life. Like life itself, archi­tec­ture is a com­plex and impure” mix­ture of incom­pat­i­ble worlds, such as tech­no­log­i­cal ratio­nal­i­ty and artis­tic expres­sion, knowl­edge and belief, con­scious inten­tion­al­i­ty and uncon­scious pro­jec­tion, and con­se­quent­ly, its very essence can­not be inclu­sive­ly the­o­rized or pre­dict­ed. Archi­tec­ture is not a result of a ful­ly ratio­nal oper­a­tion, as it is always also an expres­sion of inten­tions and desires, beliefs and dreams. It facil­i­tates con­crete require­ments, but it is always also a con­fes­sion. It is a con­fes­sion, wish and vision, as much as it is a result of rea­son­ing and deduc­tion. It fus­es real­i­ty and dream, knowl­edge and desire. It is not just a vehi­cle for spe­cif­ic util­i­tar­i­an pur­pos­es, as it also unavoid­ably shapes our­selves, our self-under­stand­ing. In the Jonas Salk Insti­tute by Louis Kahn, for instance, it is not the architect’s per­for­ma­tive skill that moves and dig­ni­fies us, it is the unex­plain­able author­i­ty of the build­ing and the meta­phys­i­cal void of the court­yard, a space open­ing to the hori­zon of the Pacif­ic ocean, that con­nects us with cos­mic dimen­sions and sends shiv­ers through our ner­vous system.

Architecture as a Synthesis

As a young man, Alvar Aal­to believed in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pure­ly ratio­nal archi­tec­ture, and in the ear­ly 1930s he was even work­ing on a book on non-syn­thet­ic archi­tec­ture”.16 I do not believe that it is sen­si­ble to con­cen­trate on syn­the­sis in tack­ling an archi­tec­tur­al assign­ment […] the Func­tion­al­ist archi­tect is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sion­al type from the old-style archi­tect. In fact he is not an archi­tect at all; he is a social admin­is­tra­tor”, Aal­to said in an inter­view.17 Yet, ten years lat­er he made an exact­ly oppo­site state­ment with equal assur­ance: Archi­tec­ture is a syn­thet­ic phe­nom­e­non cov­er­ing prac­ti­cal­ly all fields of human activ­i­ty. An object in the archi­tec­tur­al field may be func­tion­al from one point of view and unfunc­tion­al from anoth­er […] If there were a way to devel­op archi­tec­ture step by step, begin­ning with the eco­nom­ic and tech­ni­cal aspects and lat­er cov­er­ing the oth­er more com­pli­cat­ed human func­tions, the pure­ly tech­ni­cal func­tion­al­ism would be accept­able; but no such pos­si­bil­i­ty exists […] Tech­ni­cal func­tion­al­ism is cor­rect only if enlarged to cov­er even the psy­chophys­i­cal field. That is the only way to human­ize archi­tec­ture.18 As a result of his new­ly reversed ide­ol­o­gy, Aal­to began to speak of archi­tec­ture as a syn­thet­ic aspi­ra­tion and to the­o­rize ideas of extend­ed ratio­nal­ism” and flex­i­ble stan­dard­iza­tion”.19 Aal­to also saw the bio­log­i­cal and neu­ro­log­i­cal dimen­sions of archi­tec­ture: I would like to add as my per­son­al, emo­tion­al view that archi­tec­ture and its details are in some way all part of biol­o­gy”.20 Four years lat­er Richard Neu­tra extend­ed the bio­log­i­cal view to the human ner­vous make-up”. Today design may exert a far-reach­ing influ­ence on the ner­vous make-up of gen­er­a­tions”, Neu­tra pro­fessed.21 Today, six­ty years lat­er, neu­ro­sci­en­tists are study­ing these influ­ences and inter­ac­tions with today’s extra­or­di­nary lab­o­ra­to­ry instru­ments and focused sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. Due to the entic­ing pow­er of new tech­nolo­gies in research, the philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ing of the nature of archi­tec­ture as a fun­da­men­tal­ly men­tal endeav­our, is cru­cial as a guide to research and, espe­cial­ly, for the inter­pre­ta­tion of the sci­en­tif­ic find­ings in neuro-science. 

Art, Architecture and Science

In his inau­gur­al lec­ture enti­tled Art and Tech­nol­o­gy”, as the new­ly appoint­ed mem­ber of the Acad­e­my of Fin­land in 1955, Aal­to made his con­fi­dence in the artis­tic approach in archi­tec­ture clear: Almost every for­mal assign­ment involves dozens, often hun­dreds, some­times thou­sands of con­flict­ing ele­ments that can be forced into func­tion­al har­mo­ny only by an act of will. This har­mo­ny can­not be achieved by any oth­er means than art. The final val­ue of indi­vid­ual tech­ni­cal and mechan­i­cal ele­ments can only be assessed after­wards. A har­mo­nius result can­not be achieved with math­e­mat­ics, sta­tis­tics, or prob­a­bil­i­ty cal­cu­lus”.22 Aal­to made this state­ment on the pri­ma­cy of art over sci­ence in the con­text of archi­tec­ture know­ing that some of the most author­i­ta­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tives of sci­en­tif­ic think­ing in Fin­land were present at his lec­ture. I am not speak­ing here of a pri­ma­cy of art over sci­ence, or vice ver­sa, I am point­ing out their con­sti­tu­tive difference. 

The rela­tion­ships and inter­ac­tions of sci­ence and art are still an ongo­ing dis­cus­sion today. In our util­i­tar­i­an cul­ture sci­ence is usu­al­ly judged to have a high­er truth val­ue, but there are also voic­es that see the mean­ing of art bee­ing clos­er to the real­i­ties of life. Vit­to­rio Gallese, one of the dis­cov­er­ers of the mir­ror neu­rons, which have opened promis­ing views into our uncon­scious pre-reflec­tive and affec­tive inter­ac­tions with the world, express­es an unex­pect­ed view of the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence and art. From a cer­tain point of view, art is more pow­er­ful than sci­ence. With much less expen­sive tools and with greater pow­er of syn­the­sis, artis­tic intu­itions show us who we are, prob­a­bly in a more exhaus­tive way with respect to the objec­ti­fy­ing approach of the nat­ur­al sci­ences. Being human squares with the abil­i­ty to ask our­selves who we are. Since the begin­ning of mankind, artis­tic cre­ativ­i­ty has expressed such abil­i­ty in its purest and high­est form.”23 This state­ment by a human­ist sci­en­tist is sur­pris­ing­ly par­al­lel with Alvar Aalto’s intu­itive view 60 years ear­li­er. Semir Zeki, the British neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist, extends the realm of the intu­itive artis­tic grasp to human neur­al phe­nom­e­na: Most painters are also neu­rol­o­gists […] they are those who have exper­i­ment­ed upon and, with­out even real­iz­ing it, under­stood some­thing about the orga­ni­za­tion of the visu­al brain, though with the tech­niques that are unique to them”.24 I see no rea­son to lim­it this argu­ment of the artist’s intu­itive grasp of neur­al real­i­ties to visu­al brain alone. The artist can­not, of course, be a neu­ro­sci­en­tist in the dis­ci­pli­nary sense of the sci­ence, but she can intu­ite aspects of the func­tion­ing of her neur­al net­works. As we know now, the sens­es inter­act and col­lab­o­rate and cross-modal inter­ac­tions are not lim­it­ed to the spe­cial phe­nom­e­non of synes­the­sia. An artist may not know any­thing about neu­ro­science, yet she may be able to live and intu­it neu­ro­log­i­cal cor­re­la­tions through her sen­si­tized sense of exis­ten­tial causal­i­ties. This sen­si­tiv­i­ty to its own func­tion­ing must be con­sid­ered a unique qual­i­ty of our neur­al constitution. 

It is evi­dent that there are numer­ous areas and sub-ques­tions in archi­tec­tur­al design—that can and should—be approached through sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and method­olo­gies. Archi­tec­ture has a dou­ble essence, func­tion­al and tech­ni­cal ratio­nal­i­ty, on one hand, and the exis­ten­tial medi­a­tion between the mind and the world, on the oth­er. Even func­tion­al design does not only respond to the brief, as it active­ly chore­o­graphs and ini­ti­ates action, and even the tech­ni­cal aspects can medi­ate poet­ic inten­tions. I do not under­es­ti­mate the cog­ni­tive and ratio­nal ground of build­ing design, but I wish that the human capac­i­ties of feel­ing, atmos­phere, intu­ition, mem­o­ry, empa­thy, com­pas­sion and imag­i­na­tion are not under­es­ti­mat­ed. Ques­tion­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of com­put­ers in the var­i­ous phas­es of project devel­op­ment today would be thought­less. My argu­ment is that as a deeply ground­ed cul­tur­al, men­tal and artis­tic com­plex­i­ty, an archi­tec­tur­al propo­si­tion can­not be ful­ly the­o­ret­i­cal­ly for­mu­lat­ed and mechan­i­cal­ly or dig­i­tal­ly con­ceived. Thus, archi­tec­ture must be ground­ed on impure” and par­tial the­o­ries, and hybrid” meth­ods com­bin­ing knowl­edge and pre­ci­sion with imag­i­na­tion and intu­ition. As a con­se­quence of its com­plex­i­ty, archi­tec­ture is bound to arise from an iter­a­tive and fused embod­ied action rather than mere ratio­nal­i­ty. There can well be the­o­ries and sci­ence-based ratio­nal aspects in the design process, but in its entire­ty the process is iter­a­tive­ly syn­thet­ic, which was Alvar Aalto’s view above. The archi­tec­tur­al design process is guid­ed by a sub­jec­tive self-pilot­ing” action and an immer­sive embod­ied iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the con­crete task, that fus­es ratio­nal­i­ty and emo­tion, knowl­edge and intu­ition, real­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion, instead of being an appli­ca­tion of cere­bral, method­i­cal and pre­dictable pro­ce­dures. The design is not a log­i­cal path, as it con­tains repeat­ed devi­a­tions, dead-ends, new begin­nings, hes­i­ta­tions, tem­po­rary cer­tain­ties and a grad­ual emer­gence of an accept­able goal as the result of the process itself. 

All artis­tic works are essen­tial­ly forms of ques­tion­ing. In fact, ques­tions and answers arise simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in the poet­ic realm. Metaphor­i­cal­ly, cre­ative work is clos­er to hunt­ing or fish­ing than a sci­en­tif­ic project; you nev­er know what you are going to catch, if any­thing. Due to the essen­tial exis­ten­tial con­tent of archi­tec­ture, its design can­not be a smooth log­i­cal prob­lem-solv­ing process. This call for a hybrid approach, that is intu­itive­ly bal­anced, is also the demand­ing task of archi­tec­tur­al edu­ca­tion, but rarely under­stood in its full essence. In fact, the archi­tect needs to under­stand all the three realms of exis­ten­tial mean­ing – faith, knowl­edge and emo­tion — men­tioned in the begin­ning of this essay.

Art as Representation and Reality

One of the cen­tral devel­op­ments in the art of the past one hun­dred years has been its dis­tanc­ing from its medi­at­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al func­tion to become an increas­ing­ly autonomous and inde­pen­dent real­i­ty of its own. In his book The Dehu­man­iza­tion of Art of 1925, José Orte­ga y Gas­set pre­sent­ed a thought­pro­vok­ing idea con­cern­ing the shift­ing sub­ject mat­ter of art. In his view, the sub­ject mat­ter was first things” or events (as in the art of Car­avag­gio and Velasquez), then sen­sa­tions” (as in the works of Cézanne and Picas­so), and final­ly, ideas” (as in mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary art).25 Ortega’s view actu­al­ly sug­gests that art has approached sci­ence in its new ideation­al qual­i­ty. How­ev­er, The object of art is not to repro­duce real­i­ty, but to cre­ate a real­i­ty of the same inten­si­ty”, Alber­to Gia­comet­ti reminds us.26 The his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment of art encom­pass­es the emer­gence of abstrac­tion and auton­o­my, the plu­ral­i­sa­tion of con­cep­tions of real­i­ty as well as the increas­ing promi­nence of mul­ti­sen­so­ry prac­tices mov­ing away from pure reti­nal­i­ty towards full embod­i­ment. These ori­en­ta­tions also include the ques­tion­ing of the artist’s unique cre­ativ­i­ty (Mar­cel Duchamp, automa­tism, con­cep­tu­al art), dis­en­gage­ment of the work of art from its frame and base and its trans­for­ma­tion into an envi­ron­ment or part there­of (land­scape and land art) and, last­ly, atmos­pher­ic works whose essence lies in their mul­ti­sen­so­ry, phys­i­cal and emo­tive pres­ence, rather than in rep­re­sen­ta­tion (Ola­fur Elias­son). At the same time, art has accept­ed the mul­ti-sen­so­ry nature of human per­cep­tion. In his works Richard Ser­ra has acti­vat­ed our sense of weight, grav­i­ty and mus­cu­lar expe­ri­ence, James Tur­rell has artic­u­lat­ed expe­ri­ences of light and enabled us to see tac­tile light” and old light”, cos­mic light that has trav­elled thou­sands of light years through out­er space before hit­ting our reti­na; this expe­ri­ence even per­mits us to touch time and sense infin­i­ty and eter­ni­ty. We may well be look­ing at the light of a plan­et that does not exists any more. A num­ber of artists have also approached their field by means of sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries and meth­ods, such as the mem­bers of the Light and Space Move­ment (most notably Robert Irwin and James Tur­rell), that emerged in the 1960s, and more recent­ly the Islandic-Dan­ish artist Ola­fur Elias­son, a lat­er mem­ber of this movement.

The Magic of Beauty

The basic struc­ture of Ola­fur Eliasson’s works recurs from one piece to the next: a tech­ni­cal con­struc­tion based on ratio­nal knowl­edge and deduction—an exper­i­men­tal set­up”, in his own words—elicits a per­son­al expe­ri­ence in the spec­ta­tor. The artis­tic or poet­ic expe­ri­en­tial real­i­ty is sus­pend­ed between the work and the viewer’s self. Often the expe­ri­ence reveals an unex­pect­ed dimen­sion in the per­cep­tion of phys­i­cal real­i­ty, awak­en­ing a sense of ulti­mate­ly inex­plic­a­ble, mys­ti­cal or poet­ic nature of the lived real­i­ty. The very clar­i­ty of the effort calls forth the hid­den mys­te­ri­ous­ness of our expe­ri­ences. Even Albert Ein­stein made the sur­pris­ing con­fes­sion: The most beau­ti­ful thing we can expe­ri­ence is the mys­ti­cal. It is the source of all true art and sci­ence.”27 Here lies also the pow­er of Louis Kahn’s cos­mic void at the Salk Insti­tute. It is the sense of the mys­ti­cal that is in the dan­ger of being anni­hi­lat­ed in our cul­ture of con­sump­tion and qua­si-ratio­nal­i­ty, the super­sti­tions of our time, masked as ratio­nal­i­ty and reason. 

It is evi­dent that beau­ty is an ide­al and aim in sci­ence and math­e­mat­ics as much as in the arts. It also seems that in both sci­ence and art beau­ty is con­nect­ed with eth­i­cal judge­ment. Beau­ty is not the oppo­site of the ugly, but of the false”, the social psy­chi­a­trist Erich Fromm claims.28 Today math­e­mati­cians use the notion of dirty proof” for a math­e­mat­i­cal proof that has been achieved by immense com­put­ing pow­er, but which can­not be judged and grasped by human sens­es and intel­li­gence.29 A dirty proof does not con­form with the ide­al of math­e­mat­i­cal beauty. 

Like Ein­stein, many oth­er great sci­en­tists have seen an aes­thet­ic cri­te­ri­on in their work and choic­es. Paul Dirac, the British the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, who dis­cov­ered the laws gov­ern­ing the quan­tum behav­iour of the elec­tron, believed that the­o­ries of physics that are beau­ti­ful are prob­a­bly also true.30 Her­man Weyl, who devel­oped the quan­tum and rel­a­tiv­i­ty the­o­ries, made an even more frank con­fes­sion: My work always tried to unite truth with the beau­ti­ful, but when I had to choose one or the oth­er, I usu­al­ly chose the beau­ti­ful”.31 Today Frank Wilczek, the Nobel Lau­re­ate the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist and math­e­mati­cian, is work­ing on the­o­ries of sym­me­try as the fun­da­men­tal source of order and beau­ty in the phys­i­cal and nat­ur­al worlds. On the oth­er hand, Semir Zeki has sug­gest­ed a the­o­ry of aes­thet­ics that is bio­log­i­cal­ly based”.32 Research on the evo­lu­tion­ary ground of aes­thet­ic choice among ani­mals can be expect­ed to val­orize our own envi­ron­men­tal pref­er­ences.33 As men­tioned ear­li­er, the con­nec­tion of archi­tec­ture and biol­o­gy was already intu­it­ed by Alvar Aal­to. Today, we are enter­ing an age of biol­o­gy on all fronts.

The Shared Mission of Art and Science

Pro­found archi­tec­ture strength­ens our sense of the real, the real­i­ty of our expe­ri­ence, instead of lead­ing us to a world of fan­ta­sy. How­ev­er, this strength­ened sense of real­i­ty also enables us to dream. The court­yard space of the Salk Insti­tute sets us in the real­i­ty of the land­scape, the view of the ocean and the chang­ing weath­er and illu­mi­na­tion, as if we were on a stage, but the clar­i­ty of Kahn’s vision leads us to meta­phys­i­cal con­tem­pla­tion. Indeed, Paul Valéry asks: Is there any­thing more mys­te­ri­ous than clar­i­ty?”34

As Bachelard not­ed, the task of archi­tec­ture is to allow us to dream: If I were asked to name the chief ben­e­fit of the house, I should say; the house allows one to dream in peace […] the house is one of the great­est pow­ers of inte­gra­tion for the thoughts, mem­o­ries and dreams of mankind”.35 Through their sci­en­tif­ic or alchem­i­cal nature, Eliasson’s works remind us of the com­mon myth­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal ori­gins of art and sci­ence in won­der, and the fact that ear­li­er in his­to­ry artists prac­ticed both endeav­ours simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. In fact, as long as sci­ence stud­ied the real­i­ty observ­able by the human sens­es, the great artists were among the most sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tists of their times, where­as clos­er to our time, espe­cial­ly many biol­o­gists were remark­able drafts­men and watercolorists. 

Eliasson’s work reminds us of the explor­ers in his­to­ry of the mys­ter­ies com­mon to sci­ence and art. Both prac­tices were inspired and guid­ed by a sense of curios­i­ty and won­der. We can think of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi ver­i­fy­ing his the­o­ry of per­spec­tive in front of the Bap­tis­te­rio in Flo­rence; Leonar­do da Vin­ci per­form­ing his noc­tur­nal anato­my stud­ies in a secret Flo­ren­tine cel­lar room; Albrecht Dührer con­struct­ing a per­spec­tive image of a woman lying on the table in front of him, with his framed draw­ing device; Johannes Ver­meer exam­in­ing his mod­el through a cam­era luci­da in front of the win­dow, so famil­iar to us in his paint­ings, and; Paul Cézanne con­tem­plat­ing the dis­con­tin­u­ous tran­si­tions of horison­tal lines result­ing from his inces­sant star­ing at the still life on the table. We might also think of David Hock­ney today stooped over opti­cal devices in his attempt to prove that sci­en­tif­ic instru­ments were used as tech­ni­cal aids by artists hun­dred years ear­li­er than so far assumed. In order to prove his assump­tion, he has returned back to the use of the his­tor­i­cal tech­ni­cal devices to prac­tice his own art as his pre­de­ces­sors did more than four cen­turies before him. With the help of his numer­ous spe­cial­ly skilled assis­tants, Ola­fur Elias­son is also study­ing the mys­ter­ies of physics, as well as human per­cep­tion and under­stand­ing, in order to cre­ate expe­ri­ences that express truth, beau­ty and mag­ic, all at the same time.

Sci­ence and art can be seen as oppo­site, per­haps even mutu­al­ly exclu­sive approach­es to real­i­ty, as Bachelard did. Sci­ence has occa­sion­al­ly even been accused of rob­bing the world of its sense of mag­ic and poet­ic won­der through offer­ing expla­na­tions that only appeal to rea­son. In 1817 the poet John Keats blamed sci­en­tists like Isaac New­ton for destroy­ing the poet­ry of the rain­bow.36 How­ev­er, we need not to be sup­port­ers of either sci­ence or art, as we can have con­fi­dence in both realms, each one with its own spe­cif­ic inten­tions and tasks. I do not believe that neu­ro­science could destroy the poet­ry of archi­tec­ture. Do not sci­ence and art ulti­mate­ly both approach the mys­ter­ies of the world, human con­scious­ness and under­stand­ing, and the enig­ma of our exis­tence in the world? How would the painter or the poet express any­thing oth­er than his encounter with the world”, Mau­rice Mer­leau- Pon­ty argues, and this argu­ment sure­ly applies to the sci­en­tist and archi­tect as well.37

  1. 1

    Gas­ton Bachelard, The Poet­ics of Space (1958) (Boston: Bea­con Press, 1969).

  2. 2

    Gas­ton Bachelard, The Phi­los­o­phy of No: A Phi­los­o­phy of the New Sci­en­tif­ic Mind (New York: The Ori­on Press, 1968).

  3. 3

    Ibid., 15.

  4. 4

    Ibid., 16.

  5. 5

    Lec­ture of William Gass in the series of philo­soph­i­cal con­ver­sa­tions of the Wash­in­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St Louis at the Pulitzer Foun­da­tion Library in 2002. The author’s per­son­al note.

  6. 6

    Col­in St John Wil­son, Pub­lic Good and Pri­vate Neces­si­ty”, RIBA Jour­nal, March 1979.

  7. 7

    Jean-Paul Sartre, What is lit­er­a­ture?”, Jean-Paul Sartre:Basic Writ­ings, ed. Stephen Priest (Lon­don and New York: Rout­ledge, 2001), 272.

  8. 8

    Paul Valéry, Dia­logues, (New York: Pan­theon Books, 1956), 94.

  9. 9

    Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts: Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2000), 115.

  10. 10

    Vida Kata­ri­na Vidovic, The Abstract World Urn for Gior­gio Moran­di”, Juhani Pal­las­maa, One week work­shop, Ljubl­jana, May 2015, Work­shop Report (Ljubl­jana: Uni­ver­si­ty of Ljubl­jana, 2015), 55.

  11. 11

    J.G. Bal­lard, Crash Kolari (Helsin­ki: Loki-Kir­jat, 1996), 8.

  12. 12

    Rudolf Wit­tkow­er, Archi­tec­tur­al Prin­ci­ples in the Age of Human­ism (New York: Ran­dom House, 1965), 117.

  13. 13

    Alber­to Pérez-Gómez, Archi­tec­ture and the Cri­sis of Mod­ern Sci­ence (Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts and Lon­don, Eng­land: The MIT Press (1983), 1990), 298.

  14. 14

    Hannes Mey­er, Build­ing” (1928), in Claude Schnaidt, Hannes Mey­er Build­ings, Projects and Writ­ings (Teufen AR / Schweitz: A Nig­gli, 1965), 94.

  15. 15

    Aino and Alvar Aal­to, Mairea”, project descrip­tion, Arkkite­hti, No. 9, 1939.

  16. 16

    Aal­to held two lec­tures in 1930 with the title Non-Syn­thet­ic Aspi­ra­tions in Archi­tec­ture”; the lec­tures do not exist.

  17. 17

    Alvar Aal­to, Inter­view”, Nidaros, Trond­heim, Nor­way, 28 June , 1930 in Alvar Aal­to The Deci­sive Years, Göran Schildt (New York: Riz­zoli, 1986), 195–6.

  18. 18

    Alvar Aal­to, The Human­iz­ing of Archi­tec­ture”, Alvar Aal­to in His Own Words, ed. Göran Schildt (Helsin­ki: Ota­va Pub­lish­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd., 1997), 102–3.

  19. 19

    Alvar Aal­to, Ratio­nal­ism and Man”, Alvar Aal­to in His Own Words, op.cit., 91.

  20. 20

    Alvar Aal­to, The Trout and the Stream”, Alvar Aal­to in His Own Words, op.cit., 108.

  21. 21

    Richard Neu­tra, Sur­vival Through Design (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1954), 7.

  22. 22

    Alvar Aal­to, Art and Tech­nol­o­gy”, Alvar Aal­to in His Own Words, op.cit., 174.

  23. 23

    Vit­to­rio Gallese and C Di Dio, Neu­roes­thet­ics: The Body in Esthet­ic Expe­ri­ence”, The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Human Behav­iour, Vol. 2, ed. V.S. Ramachan­dran (Ams­ter­dam: Else­vi­er, 2012), 693.

  24. 24

    Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Explo­ration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1999), 2–3.

  25. 25

    José Orte­ga y Gas­set, The Dehu­man­iza­tion of Art and Oth­er­Es­says on Art, Cul­ture, and Lit­er­a­ture (Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press, Prince­ton, NJ, 2013).

  26. 26

    I learned the quote of Alber­to Gia­comet­ti from a stu­dent in my work­shop in Ljubl­jana in 2015, see note 9. Orig­i­nal source unknown.

  27. 27

    Albert Ein­stein, quot­ed in Richard Dawkins, op.cit..

  28. 28

    Erich Fromm, source uniden­ti­fied, most like­ly Escape from Free­dom (1941).

  29. 29

    The notion dirty proof” was used by sev­er­al lec­tur­ers at the con­fer­ence Sim­plic­i­ty – Ideals in Prac­tice in Math­e­mat­ics & the Arts”, City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York, Grad­u­ate Cen­ter, 3–5 April, 2013.

  30. 30

    Paul Dirac, The Evo­lu­tion of the Physicist’s Pic­ture of Nature”, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, 208, nro 5 (May 1963), 45–53.

  31. 31

    In mein­er Arbeit habe ich immer ver­sucht, das Wahre mit den Schö­nen zu vere­inen; wenn ich mich über das Eine oder das Andere entschei­den musste, habe ich stets das Schöne gewält”. The quo­ta­tion­ap­pears above the bust of Weyl locat­ed in the Her­mann Weyl Zim­mer at the ETH Zurich. 

  32. 32

    Semir Zeki, op.cit., 1.

  33. 33

    For a thought­pro­vok­ing dis­cus­sion on beau­ty and autonomous aes­thet­ic choise among ani­mals, espe­cial­ly birds, see: Richard O. Prum, The Evo­lu­tion of Beau­ty: How Darwin’s For­got­ten The­o­ry of Mate Choise Shapes the Ani­mal World – and Us (New York: Anchor Books, 2018).

  34. 34

    Paul Valéry, Eupali­nos or the Archi­tect”, Dia­logues (New York: Pan­theon Books, 1956), 107.

  35. 35

    Gas­ton Bachelard, The Poet­ics of Space, op.cit., 6.

  36. 36

    Quot­ed in Richard Dawkins, Bar Codes in the Stars”, op.cit., 13. This quote has also been attrib­uted to anoth­er poet, William But­tler Yates.

An ear­li­er, more brief, ver­sion of this essay was pub­lished in the first issue of the Inter­twin­ing Jour­nal, Venice, 2018. A ver­sion of the essay was also giv­en as a lec­ture in August 2018 enti­tled Between Art and Sci­ence: real­i­ty and expe­ri­ence in archi­tec­ture and art” at the New School of Archi­tec­ture and Design in San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia in the sum­mer course on Archi­tec­ture and Neuroscience.