The Conservation of Cities (review)

Books 79 Many before him have sought to forge a link between psychology and architecture, mostly on the statistical plane of factor analysis and semantic differentials. Comparatively few attempts have been made to relate fundamental principles of perception to the broad spectrum of architecture. Whilst frequently drawing upon experimental data, this book is nevertheless firmly in the latter category. It says things that many architects will appreciate, in a way that they will understand. Indeed Arnheim displays an astonishing knowledge of architecture ; he deals with the subject with an authority that would be appropriate to a professional architectural critic. Throughout the book the author is concerned with the way things appear rather than actually are. He demonstrates how the perception of buildings is conditioned by human physiology and the experiencesone has of the physical world. Meanings are read into architecture derived from both personal and collective experience. This is something much larger than empathy. For examplehe stressesthe importance of the verticaldimension over the other co-ordinates of Cartesian geometry, because it is associated with overcoming gravity. Ascent is achieved only by effort that is rewarded by a sense of prevailing over nature, of superiority and overview. Honour is attributed to the highest structures. Hard-line experimentalists might balk at such assertions as: ‘Weknow from daily experience that symmetry is more readilyobservedin the upright position than in the recliningone.’ A fundamental premise of the book is that humans are born with an ‘inherent senseof order’. Arnheim believes strongly that they are genetically programmed with ‘the sure sense of form’. This ‘intuitive sense of what goes well together’ is found in its spontaneous state in children, but he says that education, on the whole, succeedsin inhibiting this ‘spontaneous sense of form’. One of the most interesting chapters for designersis likelyto be that which discusses ‘order and disorder’. There is detailed consideration ofhow form and order are perceived.Elements in a scene or a building are ascribed with ‘perceptual weight’. The weights interact to produce a kind of contest of forces. In perceiving such a system, ‘the mind is governed by the sensation of pushes and pulls. . . .that are the sensedeffectsof physiological processes that must be assumed to be occurring in the corresponding brain fields . . . . Intuitive ordering can be considered a reflectiofi3 physical field processes that take place in ’ [As regards Arnheim’s discussion of ‘order and disorder’, see Leonardo 6, 331 (1973).] This has echoes of Gestalt isomorphism. The idea of perceptual ‘pushesand pulls’ is useful as a metaphor. As yet I know of no neurophysiological evidence that such ‘field processes’ actually occur. Those who are repelled by Arnheim’s confidence in this matter should not be blinded to the usefulness of the metaphoric idea. An important aspect of Arnheim’s proposition is that both objects and architectural spaces are capable of generating ‘force vectors’. He stresses the positiveness of space, recommending that the architect ‘cultivatehis sense of when space is empty and when it is not’. He states that an orderly arrangement of elements is one in which there is sufficient difference between the components to dispel uncertainty, but not so much as to cause visual fragmentation . Disorder, on the other hand, is ‘a clash of unco-ordinated orders’. A disorganised system appears to have ‘beenstopped on its way to a stable solution __.’_ In this context Arnheim takes issue, somewhat forcefully, with Robert Venturi, renowned for his advocacy of ‘contradiction’ in architecture. Arnheim finds thisto be synonymous with disorder and totally inconsistent with proper architectural ideals. This will, no doubt, distress the protagonists of ‘ad hoc’architecture and the like, a distress that I feel will be well earned. His arguments range wide and include broader social issues. Disorderly architecture in which the emphasis rests with the bits rather than the whole, he believes, is functionally related to an ‘atomized’social lifewhere individuality reigns supreme and the rule is competition. ‘An atomized environment ... encourages focussingon disconnected items, vision handicapped by blinders, which cannot but interfere with intelligent behaviour.’This is an important point upon which Arnheim might be encouraged to elaborate in the future. It takes courage to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics , but what else can this...