The Inner Studio: A Designer's Guide to the Resources of the Psyche

By Andrew Levitt

The Inner Studio unveils a place of learning inside each of us where we can learn lessons about ourselves that are inseparable from what we design and build. Filled with anecdotes, examples and exercises, The Inner Studio guides readers into deeper levels of our imagination and decision making, focusing squarely on the experience of the designer during the creative act of design. How do designers convert their subjective and often unconscious experience of the world into design? What are the creative consequences of what we may call, designing from within?” Welcome to The Inner Studio.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Riverside Architectural Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781926724348

Book preview

The

INNER STUDIO

The

INNER STUDIO

A DESIGNER’S GUIDE TO

THE RESOURCES OF THE PSYCHE

Andrew Levitt

RIVERSIDE ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

University of Waterloo School of Architecture

Copyright © 2007 & 2015 by Andrew Levitt and Riverside Architectural Press. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Levitt, Andrew, 1953–

The inner studio : a designer’s guide to the resources of the psyche / Andrew Levitt.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-926724-66-9 (epub). — ISBN 978-1-926724-67-6 (mobi)

1. Architectural design — Psychological aspects. 2. Design — Psychological aspects. 3. Design, Industrial — Psychological aspects. I. Title.

NA2705.L49 2006 720.1’9 C2006-905770-2

EDITOR: Andrea Knight

BOOK DESIGN: Jack Steiner Graphic Design

FRONT COVER AND DIAGRAMS: David Warne

COVER PHOTO: The House of the Mosaic Atrium, Herculaneum, by permission Werner Forman Archives

07 08 09 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has taken shape slowly over the last ten years through talks, seminars, and conversations, and I owe a great deal of thanks to many people. In particular, I want to thank the many students at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture whose imagination and determination inspired the core of this exercise.

I also want to express my sincere appreciation to those who encouraged me and helped drive this project forward. Among them, Ryszard Sliwka, Robert Van Pelt, Fred Thompson, Philip Beesley, Janna Levitt, and Tim Scott all made valuable contributions. Thanks also to Andrea Knight whose editing skillfully guided this book through to completion.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to Hannah, Josh, and Jake for their interest and enthusiasm, and to my wife, Wendy, whose love and support made this book possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

A CASE STUDY Toronto: The City Who Is Whole

PART ONE The Inner World of Psyche

Unconscious

Calling On the Unconscious in Design

The Designer’s Journal

Visiting Places

PART TWO The Creative Instinct

Four Reflections on Being Creative

Openness

Kyoto

Being Moved

Design What You Love: Our Hearts’ Desires

Insight

A Unit of Design: A Question Answered

Intention

The Question

The Gap

Receiving

Do It Again and Again

Into the Feeling of Process

Taking Care of Your Ideas

Understanding

Stabilizing the Idea

PART THREE Inner Resources

The Body

The Body as Designer

Knowing Kinesthetically

Listening to Fatigue & Exhaustion

Body-Centered Design

The Furniture of George Nakashima

Dreams

Architecture at Night

The Structure of the Dream

Working with the Dream

Symbols

The Symbolic World of Masculine & Feminine

The National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico

The Symbolic House

Belongings, Possessions

Designers’ Dream Work

Frank Gehry in Berlin

Shadow

The Built World as a Barometer of Wholeness

The New Public Place of Shadows

Maya Lyn, The Viet Nam Memorial

PART FOUR Inner Know-How

Visualization

The Experience of Visualization

Preliminary Practices

Active imagination

Learning to Wrestle

Wrestling with Design Development

The Child in the Adult

Drawing First Drawings

Drawing as Language

Some Guidelines for Starting Out

The Parti Drawing

Inner & Outer First Critiques

Generating Creative Inventory

First Stage: Preliminary Design

PART FIVE Using This Life to Be Creative & Wise

The Four Functions

Working with Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Thinking Too Much

Getting Stuck

12 Ways of Getting Stuck

Drawing on Our Own Inner Resources

Hearing the Roots of the Creative Voice

The Wall

PART SIX The Proliferation of Design

Breaking Through

RESOURCES

Introduction

The Inner Studio is about learning to communicate from deep down in our imagination where creative instincts live and have meaning. It invites designers to trust the wisdom and creativity of their bodies, dreams, and shadows and bring these resources into the experience of design. Every creative process involves a dimension of pilgrimage. The Inner Studio sees the act of design as a special kind of school, a place of learning inside each of us where our relationship to creativity has the potential to teach us lessons about ourselves that are inseparable from what we build. This book is about the rich inner world of design.

Designers are people who feel passionately about the world, but rather than composing songs or writing novels, they express themselves by making decisions about the way material is organized, shaped, colored, and assembled. We cannot help ourselves. No item is too small to escape our eye and no event is too large to exceed our belief in the magical capacity of design to make a difference. Designers can be found everywhere–trying to improve cities, planning the way kitchens are arranged, thinking about the shapes of windows and the best material for a roof in the desert.

This book is for those of us who love design, who are fascinated by its problems and feel passionate about its possibilities. It is for professionals whose interest in architecture, landscape, interiors, graphics, or industrial design continues to grow and deepen, and for students who may feel both attracted to and surprised by design’s powerful call. It is for people who want to express themselves through their environment and the decisions they make about the formal world. This book is for those who want to bring more of their inner world into the built world.

The idea of The Inner Studio grew out of my own realization that although we live in a world in which it is impossible to turn on the TV without hearing psychological discussions about adolescents, presidents, quarterbacks, or home renovations, our psychological awareness has not translated into a more inspired or compassionate built world.

Today a designer’s education takes place in three places: in classrooms, where technical information is imparted; in professional offices, where students learn about real world practices; and in the design studio where creativity is cultivated and imagination is encouraged. Design students tend to practically live in studio and, while every school has unique and particular culture, the common element of studio life is comradeship and creative intensity. The culture within the studio may be driven by one powerful personality or a widely supported design ideal, but the rich and intimate job of relating, prioritizing, and reconciling the diverse experiences of creativity rests within each individual. I think of the place where these decisions are made as the inner studio. The Inner Studio is where inspirations, imagination, longings, dreams, physical symptoms, intuitions, and design instincts arise and have their meaning. The Inner Studio is the place inside us that hosts our moments of discovery and elation and it is the place where we experience doubt and lose our resolve. It is the place inside us–The Inner Studio–that this book explores, validates, investigates, and celebrates. I hope that the approach of focusing on The Inner Studio encourages designers to experience the act of design as a process inseparable from enriching the self.

Architects have traditionally played a leading role in the design and building that shapes the world. It is true that this responsibility does not fall on their shoulders alone–it usually involves teams of professional colleagues such as highly skilled engineers, contractors, and other consultants who share in the considerable complexity, constraints, and liabilities–but it is difficult to imagine another profession that has the practical expertise, creative reach, theoretical understanding, and legal jurisdiction of modern architects when it comes to designing, shaping, and organizing the built world.

Why does The Inner Studio focus squarely on the act of design? Because the world we live in is now so exhaustively designed. The chair you are sitting in, the window you look through, the morning commute, the butter knife–beautiful or banal–all of these are the result of design. Anything that has been built has first been designed. Even those unbuilt places we cherish, such as wilderness areas, owe their continued existence to our capacity and intent to design and legislate for their survival. According to the World Watch Institute, by the end of this decade, for the first time, the majority of the earth’s citizens will live in cities. This should give us pause.

Where we once lived in a symbiotic or harmonious relationship to our natural environment, today we live in a thoroughly built world in which we are rapidly losing the opportunity to gain the deeper self-knowledge that comes from observing the arising and passing away of natural things. Not only were we once part of nature, all the happenings of our inner world were considered natural. How can self-knowledge be extracted from the designed environment unless the designers themselves can consciously experience their own inner worlds and use these to promote selfknowledge?

The purpose of psychology is to guide us through human problems and to help us make sense of our lives. Where we once prospered by studying the migration of animals, we now find ourselves struggling to know how we feel about ourselves and others. Clearly we live in a world that is both physical and psychological and we can no longer afford to leave out the complex, paradoxical, and often troublesome role of feelings that occur during the design process. Society has distinguished itself by its willingness to integrate new technologies–The Inner Studio proposes using the self-knowledge and creativity that reside in our modern understanding of the psyche.

Architects will often explain their work by saying that it has been designed from within. This usually means that we are designing from some rational appreciation of a building’s organization. I want to suggest a less intentional explanation, that there is a moment in the creative process that rests on a different kind of know-how, on the relationship we have to the inner world of our psyches. The role of inner know-how, the world of instinct, imagination, and intuition, the world of subtlety and felt sense, is not only a complementary counterweight to our technical training and practical skills, it also represents a part of ourselves that needs to be respected and developed and included in the built world.

The part of us that is at the undeclared center of creativity is outside most architectural curriculum, and it may seem odd to suggest that self-knowledge needs to become an integral part of a designer’s education. But I find it very interesting that this undeclared inner world of the designer has always been covert and ignored in education. Schools make every investment in the outer world–becoming wired, striving for enhanced global information exchanges, competing for academic excellence–and all of these are important, but they do not begin to address the deeper strata of conscious and unconscious longings, needs, emotions, and desires that influence decision makers and affect decision making. I have come to believe that the idea of declaring the role played by the psyche in the creation of the built world is the best way to guide architectural know-how and heal the environment. The revolution I am imagining is one where we step back and consider that learning how to face design problems is critically important in learning how to solve them, where we consider that the how can not be separated from the what.

While studying architecture in London, I often visited a public library on St. Martin’s Street where I would spend time, reading, drawing, daydreaming, and wandering through the rich collection of books and journals. There was a modest scale to the three-story building and, sitting at a wooden desk in my favorite chair, I always felt comfortable, as though I was enjoying a stimulating conversation in the lobby of a small hotel. This was a library in which any idea could either be tracked back to its origins or projected into some future possibility.

One day I stumbled across an essay in Art International called Suicide and the Soul by the American psychologist James Hillman. I began reading and soon found myself completely immersed in the world of the psyche he described. I read late into the evening and returned to the library in the morning to finish the article before combing the bookshelves for works by Freud and Jung in order to better understand the essay. For the next week I returned every day to the library to read about the psyche. I moved from my usual chair in the art section to the psychology section of the library, and as I looked out a different window and studied from a new chair, it seemed to me that the very shape of the interior had somehow changed since my first visit to the building a year earlier. For an entire week I ate my lunch in the library and consumed everything I could find about the psyche until, without realizing it, something inside of me shifted and the mysterious dynamics of the unconscious took hold of me.

I remember leaving the library as it was closing, late in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and walking up St. Martin’s Street towards Leicester Square. The darkening street was filled with Londoners hurrying home or rushing to do last-minute shopping. Standing on the edge of Leicester Square, I stopped in the midst of this busy scene and suddenly felt something inside me open. I had always thought that London was very reserved and its citizens introverted, but now every face and every building seemed filled with inner stories and the world was somehow alive and freely expressing these hidden messages. Amazed, I felt as though I had slipped into a place that linked and underpinned the built world and the inner world. Ever since that moment, I have been trying to understand the practical lessons this experience has to offer.

Through the years that I worked as an architect, I continued my search. I spent 10 years exploring Buddhism and finally returned to school to study psychology and began working as a psychotherapist. I love architecture, but I carried within me a passion to understand the unseen side of things. It was that feeling that the world was made of two strands, the seen and unseen, that drew me to learn about the psyche and the role of the unconscious. I felt that architecture as it is generally practiced does not include the richness and complexity we see when we look at things psychologically, where mystery, uncertainty, or difficult conditions can surface and become integrated. With the built world, the provisional and irrational nature of things is seldom acknowledged. I felt I needed to enter and explore this aspect of the world. From architecture I learned how to look at the built world and something of the forces that shape it. From Buddhism I began to appreciate the depth of inner world. Finally, with psychology, I began to learn how our inner world and the built world are related.

Psychology has an enormous appetite for architectural language. Instead of using this language to describe physical things, psychology uses it to describe the psyche, the place where our conscious and unconscious mind are thought to reside. I began to wonder if the power and wonder of architectural phenomena rests in their ability to point to structures that reside in the immeasurable world of our psyche. In the world of the psyche, as in architecture, the primary dialogue concerns the relationship and boundary between inside and outside. Inner and outer may seek congruence or be split. Where inner and outer touch, psychology uses words like façade, boundary, border, threshold, and wall. Psychologically speaking, walls may be transparent, rigid, divided, or fragile. Boundaries may be clear or need strengthening. They are subject to breaking down or may suffer a collapse, but they can also be rebuilt or repaired. Inside and outside are always interacting, and we depend on these invisible structures to make sense of the world. These psychic constructions may be functional or dysfunctional, they may feel heavy or light, or they may cause us to take flight, feel grounded, or feel out of place.

In the psychological world we commonly describe our moods with reference to space. I’m feeling down, I’m feeling up, She’s beside herself with anger, You’re driving me up the wall, She’s feeling open or He’s always closed down. We have an innate sense of ourselves as the center and use symbolic ideas about place to help us communicate our moods. We have established, through descriptions of psychological space, experiences that we bring to the built world.

Psychological language has moved quickly into every corner of our conversations because we need its capacity for describing the immeasurable yet tactile experience of moods. Words like split, compensation, sublimation, fragments, nightmare, light and shadow are found in descriptions of both the built world and therapeutic case histories. They have been absorbed into architecture with the meaning acquired in psychological discourse.

The education of designers currently begins and ends with the rational world. We might believe that this was sufficient if we did not have the evidence of a troubling state of affairs in the built world. What is missing from the built world is what is missing from the education of the designer: a more conscious agreement to include the energy, mystery, and imagination of our inner world in the process of design.

I experienced great difficulties when I began studying psychology because the skills I needed to develop did not come naturally and always seemed to evaporate when I reached for them. This experience of learning to wrestle with what I found overwhelming and difficult was the training that allowed me to help others. When I began teaching design to architecture students I felt that I had something to offer beyond design skills. I knew the psychological value of wrestling and learning from mistakes. I began to appreciate how psychological questions and issues of self-expression swirl at the heart of every creative project. Making these moments more conscious was the way to move through them and the only way to avoid unconsciously projecting them out onto individuals, communities, even whole cultures. I saw that I could teach design as a process of enriching both the designer and the world. This book gives new tools to those who want to more deeply trust and explore their creative instincts. I hope that placing the spotlight on our inner resources can help bring the creativity and wisdom of our inner world to the built world.

A CASE STUDY

Toronto:

The City Who Is Whole

I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

–RAINER MARIA RILKE

Imagine if the modern city were to walk into the office of a therapist. The complaint of our city is simple: it doesn’t know who it is or how it’s supposed to act. It worries about what it will become. One day it feels whole, the next moment it feels dulled by indifference and violence. The suffering our city feels is exhausting. It wants beauty and charm, but doesn’t know where or how to begin. It feels drugged with infrastructure and ambition, yet it wants to please. Seldom does a day pass without intense comparing, frustration, or crisis. What sort of personality does our city have? What does our city project to others, and what does it know to be true in its heart? What of the pathology and the unconscious places that have been built and ignored? The places that are rejected are often the only places of authenticity; the places that are embraced reflect only what others expect us to be. Can modern cities consciously bring into form their defining moments, their significant, oftenpainful memories, their old wounds, and those hard-to-reach places and moments that make up their true character?

What happens when urban design must include the psyche and body of the city? Cities are as subject to addictions, delusions, pathologies, and procrastinations as the individuals who live there. Cities need to bring love to their difficult places. What if we were to accept the idea that the city has conscious and unconscious parts? What do the less understood, less visited places have to teach us?

Cities are home to citizens who dream about their neighborhoods, streets, parks, intersections, and skylines. They dream about their city dramatically collapsing, they dream about getting lost, and they dream about living in new houses. What if urban design begins to consider the city as it exists symbolically through its own spaces, neighborhoods, and places? Perhaps urban planners need an inventory of such dreams, to discover what their city is saying. What if the city could learn to become more conscious of its unconscious parts? In today’s world we see cities competing like rival corporations. Every city would like to be world class, and become a well-known brand. Cities believe they can achieve this through ambition that includes state of the art facilities, new attractions, and extensive advertising. While it is true that these approaches can be successful, a city may dare to take a road less traveled. She may want to do the hard work and get to know her less-visited places as a way of re-inventing herself. Psychological growth means going through the trials of self-acceptance. Our city longs for more than an extreme makeover. Our city is ready to search for what is true. Cities need both their flawed bodies and their dreamy souls in order to ripen and mature. A city needs to be the best book you will ever read.

When I hear the call to save the environment I often find myself thinking of the city. Many cities are in peril, under pressure to become brands rather then living places. They are under pressure to be copies of other cities. This is a meditation about the city where I live. It is a portrait that offers suggestions as to how cities can become psychologically richer by discovering their unique nature and building on it. Cities are more than just the places where we live and work–they define and embody what we think life is for.

Birth

Toronto was born on the north shore of Lake Ontario between two small