Doing, Seeing; Seeing, Doing

By Leon van Schaik

For architect and educator Leon van Schaik, the way we understand our world is not an abstract consideration, but deeply rooted in physical experience. Our family houses and places of work, the gardens we have played and rested in, the landscapes we have travelled through and those we have come to call home-all of these inflect what van Schaik d

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uro Publications
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922601018

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FOREWORD

Professor Leon van Schaik, AO, is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at RMIT University. He is an architect, writer and academic with research interests focusing on spatial thinking, the poetics of architecture, urban design and the processes involved in procuring innovative architecture. Leon is the originator of the whole trajectory of design- or practice- based architectural research in Australia and has subsequently internationalised his unique program.

I’ve had the privilege of knowing Leon for more than 30 years and I spent a number of those working with him as he developed the practice-based research program at RMIT. For many of us here today, it is through his leadership and promotion of architectural innovation through practice-based research that he is best known.

Leon established the Practice Research Program to invite architects, initially, to reflect on their practice and develop critical insights into what is distinctive about what they do in their architectural design projects. This was founded on the view that design is a form of research in action, but like all research it needs to be articulated and situated in broader fields of practice and determining contexts. This knowledge needs to be shareable and ideally leads to new innovation within the design process. Leon speaks of reflection as a public behaviour.

The program at RMIT began with a cohort of 12 practicing architects invited to undertake research masters and is now, more than 30 years later, a globalized PhD program with biannual symposia in Europe the US and Asia.

Distinctive to the program is the required twice-yearly Practice Research Symposium (PRS), an intensive weekend event, where national and international critics are invited to review the work in progress and give their insights into the conduct of the program. This globalization of the program, due to Leon’s extensive international network, has been a hallmark of the PRS. On occasions this did lead to some distinctive feedback. Some years ago, during his plenary response, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow Wow described the weekend’s proceedings as ‘punk architecture’.

Alongside the development of the research program, Leon has been a tireless advocate of design across many areas. The impact of his advocacy for innovative architectural procurement is evidenced in the remarkable campus at RMIT. He always proclaimed that the army marches on its stomach while the academy marches on its publications—accordingly, he has been a prolific writer with books including Poetics in Architecture, The Practice of Practice, Design City Melbourne, Procuring Innovative Architecture and Practical Poetics in Architecture.

His impact has influenced the establishment of Practice Research programs in universities across the country and beyond. Recently, I was invited by the Canadian government to review a proposal for the establishment of the first Practice Research Doctoral Program in Canada—this initiative is being led by an alumnus of the RMIT program.

For this remarkable contribution Leon has been made a Life Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects, is the inaugural recipient of the Neville Quarry Architectural Education Prize and was awarded an AO, making him an Officer in the Order of Australia.

Professor Shane Murray, Dean of Architecture and Design at Monash University, Melbourne.



PROLOGUE

WHAT DOES ‘LOSING YOURSELF’ ENABLE IN YOU?

What is your book about? asked Max Chicard, my gardener friend. We had paused while working out how to realign a fence and make it feral cockerel proof.

Well, I said, It’s about what comes to you when you lose yourself in ordinary tasks.

Oh, he said. I try to tell my partner that using the hedge trimmer for a day puts me into a state of meditation. But she doesn’t believe me!

For 30 years my colleagues and I at RMIT have been pushing the window of discourse¹ on what research in architecture can be. We have insisted on the need for researchers and architects to examine what architects do when designing. The window needed moving, because research was confined to history (a lot), computer aided documentation (a lot), sociology of practice (a little), and technology and environmental science (a lot). Designing is a total immersion activity that leaves little trace of its doings in the designer’s front-of-mind— which might also explain the gap in knowledge here. The same is true of our spatial intelligence, which is a capability we deploy early in life (just watch a child making sense of the place that it is living in) rapidly relegated to the background of our minds, despite being the seat of what architects, landscapers and interior designers do.

Because it is so elusive, this universal human capability of spatial intelligence has been neglected. This is understandable in most areas of human endeavour, where only abstruse strands of geography focus on our ‘spatial schemata’ (the mapping of the ways in which we move through landscape), but it is unforgiveable in those whose working lives are based on spatial thinking. This book draws on the personal journey into awareness of my own history in space, a journey that has driven a lifetime of research. In parallel, the book uses the experiences of many who have participated in the reflective design practice research RMIT pioneered to surface what designers do when designing.

It has long been my belief that architecture, and consequently landscape and interior design, were professionalised on the wrong knowledge base. In Mastering Architecture (Wiley 2008) in a section titled Confusing the Knowledge Base (p176), I argued that spatial thinking, based on the human capacity for spatial intelligence, is what was overlooked in the haste to compete with engineering and master building. Our spatial intelligence capability unfolds in the world, not in abstraction. So, our family histories, the gardens that we played in or worked in, the ways in which we have travelled, what we have experienced, and where we have dwelled and worked—all of these inflect our spatial thinking. To understand our spatial thinking, we need to know how our mental space was formed.

This book includes anecdotes that have coloured my spatial thinking indelibly. I regard gardening as a spatialising action and see a seamless extension from playing and working in gardens to designing rooms, inside and outside, rural and urban. All of our practices in professions and trades arise from a body of knowledge, which is used to help other people achieve their goals. The bases of what we know is therefore crucial. Each one of us in architecture, landscape and interior architecture, owes it to ourselves and to our clients and communities to be aware of our spatial histories. Otherwise, we visit our inner worlds onto others unexamined, and with a certain violence.

I begin with my own experiences, the base of my ‘auto-theory’—the only valid kind of theory! My record starts with my earliest pocket- money earning gardening jobs and continues with my student designing and my teaching. These tasks required intense concentration and induced in me a dream-like state. Such states often allow my exploration of a complex project to crystallise into useable thoughts. The doing and its attendant seeing seem to trick my mind into releasing what it knows about what I am doing. Evidence that I am not alone in this has arisen over my years of working with student architects and practitioners of architecture, landscape, gardening and fashion.

Architectural projects are all immensely complex, and never replicable. Even building from a design in pattern books is fraught with the difficulties of differing sites, builders and local regulations, and Eureka moments even in science are myths masking the messy and collaborative reality of discovery². You cannot solve an architectural conundrum, because every particular solution generates problems for every previously established part of a proposal, within every project. Well, that is true of science too, but over a more distended timescale: in science every finding by one generation opens up new avenues of exploration for the next³. And the knowledge generated can be held in suspension, a model to be tinkered with and interrogated by many minds in many laboratories. The architect has this luxury in the sense that what is produced can become a precedent for future designing; but working to the pressing needs of clients and communities causes cut-off moments that drastically disrupt thinking. I have observed a leap-frogging process in the workings of innovative practices: a failed competition entry often becomes the platform for the design of another project. It is as if the brain of the firm⁴ has been programmed to race through preliminary reveries and can concentrate on the new product⁵.

As a student, I observed a similar process at work in my designing: there were instantaneous emergences of tentative resolutions from the moment that a brief, a site and a client were announced, and it was my practice to record each of these preliminary ideas as they emerged from deepening understandings, logging time and date. This mapping enabled me to postpone a completion until it was forced by the program and an evolved proposal could be rapidly and comprehensibly produced. I have used this approach with students in design studios and in courses that teach students how to access and understand their own spatial intelligence. And I have used it to enable distinguished practitioners to access the sources of their spatial thinking, which are usually locked away, out of reach of their conscious designing.

We are all dualists in the sense that we contain formal and informal knowing, the norms inculcated through our education dominating and supressing the totality of what we know. In the past, for me, the very act of drawing up a design caused reveries that enabled a loosening and floating of elements until the final moments. This has been named positive feedback, most powerful when formal and informal knowledge conjoins. Did this only happen when drawing? I have watched the same process at work as designers lose themselves while inputting design ideas using computing software.

Gardening has been a test bed for me. Early childhood playing in an extensive garden, growing up to help in other gardens, working in large estates, making small gardens of my own, I became aware of a lineage of garden ideas passing through generations of my own family in parallel to formal histories of gardens. Here, the total absorption into a place that one is also designing has a powerful feedback effect. Indeed, gardens are a refuge for reverie, starkly so in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. As my friend the architect and landscaper Annacaterina Piras, reading my drafts, has insisted, Boccaccio intuited this with his story of tales told in garden retreats during the 1460 plague in Florence⁶.

The processes involved in spatial thinking invoke memories that are often synesthetic. Eidetic or unwilled intense recollections of our spatial history are triggered by colour and sound, taste, touch and smell; and expressed through available languages, verbal, visual, tactile, aural, olfactory and gustative. All of these inform gardening, and also, I believe, effective space-making. Neuroscience has advanced understanding of how memories operate in the brain and through the nervous system, but the mysteries of consciousness remain as opaque as the actual working of the brain. The language we use enables us to explore models of consciousness, just as its limits constrain that exploration. This book is framed by readings about neuroscience, but primarily it uses my experience as its laboratory. It invites collaborators into investigations of many trials of formal and informal knowing and the conceptual frameworks that make them coherent. Here, they are bound into my virtual laboratory.

The frameworks are critical to the shaping of our investigations. For example, Hegel’s dualism acted as a procrustean bed to 19th-century thinking: everything was either/or and then a possible synthesis. Science today is still hampered by this background framework: when examining the genetic basis of behaviours, the scientists who divide us into the innately curious and the readily disgusted have accepted without thinking a dualistic model. Is there not a third way? We now know from the sociology of philosophy⁷ that intellectual change arises most fruitfully when three positions are being hotly pursued. Binaries cause conflict; triads ease the pressure and make it possible to consider different positions generously. Wouldn’t you frame your research into behaviour differently if you knew this?

Our formal education—even in the spatial disciplines that I am dealing with—ignores our informal intelligences and the knowledge accumulated through them. I believe that it is for this reason that our society has such difficulty with thinking and acting holistically; instrumentality trumps ecology and compassion and renders us damaged social actors who are ‘not our brothers’ or sisters’ keepers’, avoiding, as Australia’s nominally Christian Prime Minster Scott Morrison puts it, unfunded empathy.

The investigation of our spatial histories, so as to understand the framing of our spatial thinking, has been my tool for linking the formal and the informal. By comprehending the ways in which the personal influences how we navigate the formally given world, we awaken to the boundaries of our understanding; simultaneously, this opens us to new thinking.

The idea of spatial intelligence is just that, an idea. Neuroscience has uncovered some of the processes involved in our occupation of space, but we are a long way from knowing how the brain works. The brain is a complex parallel processing organ. It can do more than one thing at the same time, using both near digital and analogue neurotransmission, and continuous analogue transmission through neurohormones⁸. But as Matthew Cobb writes, citing a paper from 1997, The brain has a body. Brain-body interaction lies at the core of our spatial intelligence—probably of all our intelligence—hence the title of this book: Doing, Seeing; Seeing, Doing.

What understanding we have of the brain-body interaction has stemmed from investigations into the working of the brain that are captured in anecdotes, which in turn frame future investigation. My understanding of our spatial thinking operates in the same way. Here is a key example: when, at the commencement of his reflective practice research, Belgian architect and educator Jo Van Den Berghe and I were visiting buildings designed by him⁹, I noticed a surprising and regular use of scissor stairs arranged athwart the dominant circulation axis.

Asked about this, he gave a utilitarian answer, stating that such stairs were useful in adaptive reuse. I gave him my then recently published book Spatial Intelligence¹⁰ and asked him to look into his spatial history. Slowly, and with increasing depth, he surfaced memories of a scissor staircase in his grandmother’s house, crystalized around his getting lost up one of its arms when he was four years old, and bursting in on the old lady lying in bed with her hair down, and horrified to be so seen.

The memory came back through all of his senses—sight, sound, touch and smell—and his emotional shock at being scolded. The scissor stair worked, where other architects could have used other means, but its use had deep origins in him. This story, as an anecdote, has helped others to investigate their hidden spatial preferences.



In this drawing, Jo Van Den Berghe used the classic