Dan Bucsescu October 1996

Changing images and ideas about architectural education and the school

I first heard about the fire from a friend who prompted me to watch Channel 4 at 7 am. In disbelief I taped it and then watched its 15 seconds of television flames over and over again. The four alarm fire brought some 250 fire fighters to the building.

I have been coming to Higgins Hall (from here on HH) since 1979. Since then I have lived in four different places, but all that time HH was my second home. I shared with my colleagues the emotional impact of seeing that place go up in flames. What was burning was the Sydney's theater where Louis Kahn had lectured in 1972. What was burning was students work, their drawings and models and my lectures. What was burning was the room where on the previous Thursday, Ed Mitchell had lectured to the Summer students about the concept of "tunnel". Ed was the last among us to lecture in room B of the Multimedia Center. The next day I went to see the damage.

Watching HH burn and seeing the results was frightening. The reality of broken brick walls and charred wood beams was painful. The word 'fire' imposes itself with the full force of its imagery and its cultural associations . It forces us to pay attention to ourselves , to the structure in which we live and by extension to the structure of our ideas about architecture. The Fire and the competition gives us the opportunity and the excuse to think and write . The question is , " How do we avoid abusing the emotional event, which in its natural state needs no interpretation, no theorizing ?." A shared sense of loss will do.

And now the first question from the students : What does the fire mean to architecture as a metaphor ? or as an "event". What does it mean to use Higgins Hall as 'site'? What does it reveal /conceal ? How does it relate to the theory that you have been concerned with Architecture, its 'making' or as in this case, its 'un-making', is a pretext for critical considerations, where, starling from the built form or a burned out ruin, one succeeds to establish a law of expression where that object becomes a concrete abstraction ( a shared point of reference , an intersubjectivity). From that shared image we hope, there will spring the powers of imagination and generation necessary to understand and manifest ideas about our existence. In other words, architecture helps us construct a scaffolding bridging from one person to another, from one culture to another, and from one age to the next.

I was born in Eastern Europe at the end of WWII. For anyone of my generation, the word fire brings with it cataclysmic associations: Hiroshima, Dresden, the burning of human beings and of books. That is a heavy load when you begin to free associate on the word 'fire'. I am not going to dwell on these memories. As Richard Baker rightly reminded me, these association would most likely not mean very much for most students. Lets go on.

I look up the word in the history of ideas, and the emotional content changes. Books are good for something besides being used as pillows on a flat surface or as evidence of culture on a coffee table. For an early Greek named Heraclitus, in the 5th Century B.C., given a choice of four elements making up the world ( I assume you know what they are, but just in case I list them: earth, water, air and fire), he picks up fire as the most descriptive metaphor to define nature and the universe.

Fire as first principle is identified with life and reason.

Fire represents Becoming as opposed to Being.

Heraclitus, said : "All things are composed of fire." This proposition was for this fifth century B.C. Greek philosopher a complete view of existence. He said* . there is only one ultimate kind of matter, fire, and all other forms of matter are merely modifications and variations of fire." For Heraclitus fire is an exact physical parallel to the metaphysical principle of Becoming. Fire is the most mutable of all elements . It does not remain the same from moment to moment. It is continuously taking up matter in the form of fuel and giving off equivalent matter in the form of smoke and heat. Fire is farther identified with life and reason. The more fire there is the more life, the more movement. The soul accordingly, is fire and like all fire it continuously burns itself out and needs replenishment. This it obtains through the senses and the breath. The Stoics followed Heraclitus in seeing fire as a kind of primordial Becoming.

The opposite view of the world was proposed by another Greek, Parmenides His thoughts arise from sad observation of the transitoriness and changeableness of things. The world as we know it, is the world of change and mutation. But unlike Heraclitus , he did not think that truth can lie here, for no knowledge of that which is constantly changing is possible. Therefor the thought of Parmenides becomes an effort to find the eternal amid the shifting, the everlasting amid the change and mutation of things. For him the absolutely real is Being. Not-being is the unreal. And this not-being he identifies with Becoming. The world of sense is unreal, illusionary , a mere appearance. Being is permanent , timeless and unchanging. Parmenicles said that Being, whi&*is for him the ultimate reality, occupies space, is finite, and is spherical or globe shaped. (like an onion without the layers since his sphere was solid). Martin Heidegger called Parmenicles a "farsighted thinker and poet... and joined him in privileging Being over Becoming.

Well, here we have it . The dialectical theme that took shape 2500 years ago is still around and in full force present in our culture and architectural discourse , and by extension in our school. The talk about the fire just brings it into a sharper focus. Most of you (I am addressing the students) must be by know familiar with meaning of such terms and oppositions as Being and Becoming, permanence and change, space and time, geometric form as timeless truth or truth through acts of making, the measurable and the unmeasurable, essence and appearance etc.

Three years ago we have started to require all our first year students to read a text by Henry Bergson titled "The Perception of Change". This essay, along with many others reveals our collective emergent ideological tilt towards Heraclitus and the resultant natural affinity we find in ourselves with the metaphoric possibilities of the word "fire". Bergson's cardinal third rule is : "State problems and solve them in terms of time not of space." In other words, reference all descriptions of reality to the time dimension because only then do we account for change. That is a difficult advise for architects to follow, since at the foundation of our constructive activity is an act of geometry~ in which we stop time in order to grasp and measure space. The story Michael Serres tells is that geometry was born when Thales measured the height of a pyramid by fixing and measuring its moving shadow . Furthermore , in it's mnemonic function architecture is the ideal aid to memory as humans attempt to posses the immortality of stone and the perfection of geometric forms. The transitory nature of existence was, what architecture was supposed to deny. It is a tall order for us, architects, to live in real time when it is immortality we crave in our work. Or at least we did until recently We know better now. In cyberspace they say:" If you are not in real time, you don.t exist.." And they still have something called architecture but not made out of stone.

Exit to the inside without changing ground

"Inhabited space transcends geometrical space" (G. Bachelard)

We have lived inside this building for several decades. Now we are asked to think of it as the 'site'. In Bachelard's terms the building is a community of memory and image, a shelter for meaning . "When I receive a new poetic image, I experience its quality of inter-subjectivity.1 know that I am going to repeat it in order to communicate my enthusiasm. When considered in transmission from one soul to another, it becomes evident that a poetic image eludes causality." That's the difference in doing a project at Higgins Hall. It gives substance and poetic power to the abstract term "site analysis". I believe this is the reason why the competition was such a successful event.

Lets first take a look at the spatial organization before and after the fire.

The "fire"' unmasked the two interior facades which long ago had been visible from inside the courtyard when the North and South wings were two separate buildings at the time of the Adelphi Academy. The burning of the center inverted the the inside/outside relationship that prevailed for thirty years. We can now eRit to the inside, in a symbolic rediscovery of the school's interior -its long hidden identity revealed. The school can renew itself from within. That is how many students saw the competition. Some of the more symbolic entriies proposed that the center should be a black box made out of steel encasing the ruin, a floating theater with a multi media black box buried in its belly, an amusement park Ferris wheel or a huge naked statue of Philip Johnson, the supreme puppeteer of architectural lifes in this country. Some of these proposals were witty and their symbolic content obvious. Maybe too obvious. Someone once said : a metaphor explained is a dead metaphor . I am running that risk here.

In spite of twenty years of post-modernist talk about architecture as language, there is still a great deal of confusion among students and faculty about the relationship of form to meaning. The blind spot of most discussions -about meaning in architecture is the often forgotten fact that architecture, like music is a non-representational art form. The "architecture is language"' metaphor has been misunderstood. Architecture has been compared to verbal means of communication which it obviously is not. Because many still use the words "the object speaks" or "the object can be read " , the use of the metaphor of language to define architecture has outlived its practical usefulness J f not the reason for its introduction in the first place. This goes unchallenged in the school all the time.

But let me tell you about the onion, since now, as a result of the fire, we can enter its core.

From ONION to FIRE to Poetic Coincidence.

First I must raise a cautionary flag against an over emphasis on the 'fire' event as

a radical departure, a new beginning , the symbolic dawn of a new era in the life of the school. We don't need a new label for this moment.We don't need another zeitgeist. What we need are new practices and revival of old sense of ethics.

Nevertheless we can't deny that the 'fire', a mythical event , ranks up there with the '68 revolution when they metaphorically burned the old curriculum. Ever since my arrival at Pratt in the late 70's my senior colleagues told me stories about the good old days of the revolution. Arriving in the school ten years after those momentous events I could see that the educational fruits of those changes were not all great. But having missed the revolution I was told, I did not understand its deep intentions. Critical thinking does not fare well when nostalgia is in full bloom. What irritates one most is the appropriation of a higher moral ground due to an accident of presence. And now all of us here can say to the next generations: "I was there at the great fire!" What comes with this is a sense of entitlement to speak from personal experience.

In the mid 70's the onion emerged as the symbol of Pratt's School of Architecture model of knowledge and education.. I am told ithat the idea of the onion was born in the kitchen at a faculty retreat organized by Alan Forest and made into a famous poster with a poem/manifesto by Bill Katavolos which hanged for many years on walls of the school.

The meaning of the onion goes something like this: just like architecture it is organic, it has roots (history) .... it presents us with Jayers upon layers leading to an ever receding deep core identity at the interior an infinite regression to a presumed inner truth , a core essence and ontological foundation a timeless being for a timeless architecture. The onion also relates to learning as a gradual uncovering of layers as we move towards a deeper understanding. In its shape, the onion presents us with an horizontal section which is a perfect timeless circle, and a vertical section elongated and changing as it grows from below towards the sky transcendence, spirituality.

Some faculty argued that the architect's true soul resides at the center of our being and that it is deep and private. In their view authenticity and art spring from there. Others said : "Hey, haven't you heard, the author is dead!" The secret of life is in the operational reality of material existence, and in the our ways of functioning as complex organisms in nature. And yet others said: the soul of architecture is in geometry and math. Each of these ideas translated into different attitudes and methodologies in the studio.

Now out of the ashes of HH , it looks like we are about to propose that fire be the new image for education at our school. As we have seen, fire is a strong and fertile word. But allow me to end on another cautionary note:

The interior/exterior paradox leads to a double crisis for the architectural act . This circular argument trivializes our lifes as students, teachers and practicing architects. Architecture is seen as either a windowless essence build upon an obsessive se If- referential interiority, or, as a soulless edge condition , the result of an excessive exteriority, and its sensitivity to changing market forces or popular taste. Onion or fire. As we approach 2000 we must escape this naive dialectic. Architecture is neither and it is both in time, but it is always an act of construction in stone to which we attribute meaning. Stones don't speak. We give them a voice. The ancients knew that. Aristotle asked the question :What causes the bronze to become a statue?, What produces this change is its maker. Aristotle called it the 'efficient cause'.

Since the cause of the fire remains shrouded in mystery, we can assume that what took place was spontaneous combustion, although other explanations are possible. According to Matthew Corsover, who reports in the Prattler of this month, the only book to survive the fire in the multi-media was the old dictionary; "This dictionary found in the rubble of higgins hall had one burned out page which revealed the definition of the word Combustible." What do you think, is that a sign of divine intervention or a coincidence? Matthew only states the facts, just information as his title announces. He does'hot speculate on these possibilities .but calls the event a Poetic Coincidence with a question mark. It is a good question. Matthew understands the relationship of form and meaning .

Dan Bucsescu

October 1996