This is my Thinking Architecture essay, i thought i’d got out of doing it, but obviously not.
It has some images in the PDF (here) but their absence doesn’t really detract from the content, just the visual appeal.

‘Architectural ideas are inherited from generation to generation’. (Colomina, 1999)
Up to this point, from which architects have you inherited ideas extended in your architectural design? Name a primary architectural forefather or foremother and set out, by an analysis of a maximum of two of their projects (including art installations), how you have interpreted or modified the spatial/structural/tectonic etc concepts being purported by the earlier generation in your design. It will be important for you to posit yourself i.e. where your beliefs lie. Are you a post- Deconstructivist, Neo-Modernist, Metabolist, Constructivist, etc? It is essential you discuss how your inheritance of architectural ideas connects to and extends the aims of your DS unit and your individual design project. [Please include illustrations of the two projects by your inspirational architect showing their connection to your architectural design.]

The premise of this essay is to explore the supremely personal issue of inspiration. Initially I had planned to take a very broad approach and suggest that true inspiration, as expressed in contemporary architecture, only ever comes from outside the profession, but on consideration that statement seems a little bombastic and the reality is far more nuanced.
From a strict dictionary definition, inspiration is the act of drawing air into the lungs. This is probably very useful in clarifying what we mean when we talk about being inspired. The physiological nutrition that we gain from drawing breath can be easily equated to the intellectual nutrition that we gain from experiencing something that fits with our belief system, but extends our realm of experience. However, the actual nature of ‘inspiration’ is inherently personal, and defining it rigidly is a tricky task. In the scope of this essay, inspiration can be thought of with the above in mind but also more generally as a motivating force to do something (regardless of the positive or negative bias to that motivation).
As this essay attempts to look at architectural inspiration, we must additionally define this as a distinct thing from general inspiration. This is a much more difficult proposition. Architectural inspiration could be defined as examples of Architecture that we find pleasing, and motivate us to do similar work. I think that this definition is far too limiting. It constrains the realm of experience that can be considered inspiring to merely built form, when clearly it is possible to think of examples of architecture inspired by the natural world, or commerce.
This brings us onto the other aspect of this question. Could architectural inspiration be unrelated to an architectural end product, but begin with something that an architect has produced? This is marginally less easy to argue as a lot of the most obvious examples are ‘designer’ products designed by architects in addition to their building work so their ‘building’ design sensibilities and their ‘product’ design sensibilities are generally inexorably entwined, but there are numerous artworks that clearly reference architecture, but are not themselves architecture. The main field in which this is prevalent is film, with Fritz Lang’s metropolis, and Blade Runner being two oft-quoted examples. In this context I am going to settle on a definition which lies somewhere in between the two. So for our purposes architectural inspiration is anything that motivates and influences the thinking and then ultimately the work of someone in the pursuit of their architectural work.
Whilst it is clear that there is absolutely a transference of philosophy from generation to generation, the phrase x was a student of the great y is common in monographs. In my opinion, the significant driving force for inspiration for contemporary design and, in the case of this essay, architecture is technology.
In 1000 years of non-linear history, De Landa (2000) tracks the decline of architecture’s position in the high-tech war machine of civilisations, and its fall due to its impotence in the face of gunpowder architecture lost its position as a producer technological advances, to becoming a consumer of technology. It became dependent on technological handouts from other fields.
This initially seems compelling, but I would argue that this is actually the beginning of a shift in the weighting of importance placed on different design drivers. Military engineering progressively gave way to greater levels of decoration due to the reduction of functional concerns like how to prevent your building from falling down when your enemies hurled rocks at it.
Even in the industrial revolution, with the emergence of a building type designed almost exclusively to house enormous machinery, technology is not clear as an inspiration. The industrial sheds are simply very large versions of the civic architecture of the time.
At this point, having defined architectural inspiration earlier, it is worthwhile considering what role it actually plays in building design. D’Arcy Thompson discusses a “diagram of forces” which directs the evolutionary morphology of an organism. A similar diagram can be though of as acting on any project. The differentially oriented vectors of desire from human factors (law, budget, design sensibility etc.), and those from physical constraints (gravity, wind load, material strength etc.) resolve back to shape the project into its final configuration.
I believe that the contribution of inspiration to shaping the diagram of forces has increased significantly over the last century as the formal ‘rules’ and stylistic etiquette have been relaxed. After modernism, no significant rule based ‘ism’ emerged to replace it, post modernism at best seemed to be focused on process, not results. As such, there has been no theoretical framework (other than a perverse obsession with Deluze), or decorative syntax, to fall back on when new ideas were scarce leaving designers searching for the ephemeral ‘moment of inspiration’.
The retrospective accolade of being described as a great architect, or sticking out as an architectural forefather/mother seems to have been bestowed upon those architects that have taken on a great task, or produced a significant or even radical change of direction in architectural thought and design. These large shifts are often produced by an injection of a large pool of explicit knowledge based inspiration or even analogical inspiration from another discipline by that practitioner. For example, the publication of Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies (Hensel et al., 2004) caused a significant shift in the prevailing practice. Emergence and biomimetic design strategies were very much the concept of the moment. This drawing of breath from a new, fresh volume of ideas to fashion into new approaches to solving the existing set of problems is what I see to be the global role of inspiration.
This influx of new information will often be driven by some sort of requirement that cannot be met from within the boundaries of the prevailing practice. In searching for a way to realise the complicated forms derived from his physical model making process, Gehry broke out of the conventional mode of practice and employed computer aided engineering software (Lindsey & Gehry, 2001 p.12). This allowed him the control required to complete the job, but required a substantial input of knowledge that was not available from within the industry. This cycle of solving constraints using by solutions that require knowledge from outside the conventional sphere is frequently repeated.
In this way, what marks out particular practitioners as ‘great’ is not necessarily their greatness in the sense of being intellectual titans or their artistic capabilities, but rather their willingness to deviate from convention and engage in a trans-disciplinary mode of practice. In turn, by engaging in this way, as in any information economy, access to information allows them to take advantage of their intellectual power and artistic capability from a new perspective – they have been inspired.
Le Corbusier had a fascination with engineering, stating that “Working by calculation, engineers employ geometrical forms, satisfying our eyes by their geometry and our understanding by their mathematics; their work is on the direct line of good art.”(Le Corbusier, p.26, 1970) Implying that by following the rational thought of the engineer’s mind good architecture would naturally follow. He rejected the gentleman’s top hat traditionally worn by architects in that period, and opted for a bowler, the hat of the engineer, signalling a massive shift in the profession. Norman Foster is also an engineering fanatic, he is renowned for stating that his favourite building is the Boeing 747 (Rosenthal & Toy, 1995), and it is easy to see the philosophy of the jumbo jet made apparent in his buildings. Antoni Gaudí had a fascination with physics, geometry and force flow-efficiency, and as such built form quite unlike anything previously designed by an architect, but quite logical to a mechanical engineer.
From a historical perspective, greatness is really defined by two parties, clients and publishers. Greatness of infinite bounds would still amount to nothing if not recorded in some way. This recording process allows us to look back and see a correlation of significant fame, and technological abundance. These nodal points may not be the times of greatest influence, but they are the most memorable or identifiable parts of a history. Imagine the change from quite red to extremely red in contrast to the nodal change from quite red to quite blue.
If one visualises the trajectory of ones thoughts as a particle travelling through a force field, with general forces of everyday life influencing it, the moments of inspiration are the points when that particle hits a pinball flipper and flies of in a different direction. These moments occurred frequently during the early stages of my architectural training, but as my very green mind became progressively less so, they became less frequent. For instance, I would come away from almost every tutorial with a new direction, eager to peruse it to its ultimate end, and then two days later have the same feeling about something entirely different.
In looking back over my life in order to “Name a primary architectural forefather or foremother”, I’m afraid I draw a blank. My most significant architectural inspiration to date was seeing the work presented at the “Architectures Non-standard” exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. This motivated me to write my degree dissertation on a similar subject. I would imagine that if it were to be re-presented today, there is a significant amount of the work presented there that there I would probably not find inspirational due to the change in my base level of exposure to that sort of work, but that does not in any way diminish it’s value to me. There is no single person who was exhibiting there who I could claim to be inspired by specifically, but I see visiting the exhibition as the most significant nodal point in my undergraduate career.
The view of inspiration outlined above is fairly exclusive, and could probably be likened to the sharp intake of breath and corresponding feeling of renewal that one experiences after a long period underwater. Perhaps it would be beneficial to expand the definition to contain all the weaker and less instantaneous forces that act upon our design position.
If it were possible to map these forces, then would it be possible to extrapolate the direction into the future and, unless there is a moment of nodal inspiration, predict ones own design position next week? That would assume a static set of forces, and no turbulence, but as ideas don’t follow any physical laws that we know of, their conception is subject to chaotic behaviour. There are moments of introspective inspiration where the brain re-assesses existing, know information, and comes to a conclusion. These moments could be seen as enlightenment by meditation, or as mostly we weren’t actively looking for the inspiration, the inspiration emerges as a product of background processing and is simply a pleasant surprise.
I have deliberately avoided the issue of intuition in this essay, as there is a massive wealth of theory related to it from disciplines as wide ranging as economics to zen battle mind-states. Also, it could be argued that although intuition comes from inside, and must therefore be a result of outside influences, it’s subtitles make it too broad a subject.
The expansive nodal view of inspiration as a point where one is compelled to do something and to totally rethink their view on life probably happens extraordinarily infrequently. There are events that modify, or nudge our trajectory in a much more subtle way, and there are attractors and repellers that influence the trajectory in a more continuous way. Obviously the real nature of design thinking would require a spectacularly complex, multidimensional space to plot this trajectory. However, if it is imagined in a conventional two dimensional space, as a steel snooker ball rolling over the baize, the moments of great inspiration might be when the ball hits the cushion and changes direction, the smaller events could be seen as glancing blows off other balls, and the continuous forces would cause the ball’s to curve. This analogy is woefully inadequate to fully illustrate the complexity of thought, but hopefully it goes some way to making thinking about thinking a little easier.
Refs
DeLanda M (2000) A Thousand Years Of NonlInear History. New York: Zone
Le Corbusier (1970). Towards a New Architecture. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Lindsey B, Gehry F (2001). Digital Gehry: Material Resistance, Digital Construction. Basel: Birkhauser.
Migayrou F. (December 10 2003 - March 1 2004 ). Non standard Architectures. Paris: Centre pompidou.
Thompson D (1917). On Growth and Form. London: Dover.