6. Feedback from cross-year tutorial + ideas for Project 2
On a tutorial, at first, I got a suggestion to bring those visions to life in a realistic way, to trick the eye and make them believable.
But when I said this is not what I wanted to explore, another advice was to take it back to architecture. That architectural drawings, even though not realistic, hold some king of legitimacy, they’re grounded in our reality, and that’s why they seem tangible.
There was an idea to gather unrealised projects together in one non-existent reality.
And an example of Aldo Rossi’s drawings of San Cataldo Cemetery, and the contrast between what this place could be, and what it actually is. The set of expectations based on the drawings blinds one to reality which then seems disappointing and underwhelming. That’s actually another example of that interesting tension between the inside of a human mind and reality.
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And I think it’s a good phrase – tension between human mind and reality – is that not perception? There’s something about it that we never quite get the exact picture of reality. It’s not that it’s distorted. It’s fragmentary. And then based on those observed fragments, pieces of reality, each of us builds their own reality in their heads.
Instead of ‘build’ I wanted to write ‘grow’. Which term would reflect on it better? In the end, we’re not fully aware of this mechanism, it’s nature of our minds. And even when awakened we start to notice its workings, all we can do is just remind ourselves that it’s just a mechanism, it’s there, we can’t help it, but we don’t have to be controlled by it. Which, again, doesn’t mean that at some point we’ll be able to see the world for what it really is, rather we can remember how little we know and how many assumptions we take as facts.
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In the written component, I want to look in different lights at stories. How do they work, why are they so important in human existence, or rather that they seem to be an innate part of human nature. I see it as a set of a few writing slightly complementing each other, sometimes overlapping in some areas, and vaguely giving the sense of a wider picture – using the Gestalt principles of perception that also relate to the topic.
Here are a few paths I would like to follow that emerges so far from from relating different reference texts to each other:
- The role of stories as myths and symbols – beliefs about our world, and religions, as well as their relation to the sense of meaning in life.
- Personal stories – building an identity, a set of beliefs about oneself to make sense of one’s own existence – which in contexts of psychology, and spirituality is called the ego.
- I also wanted to touch on dreams, because I have a hunch (still need to research), that they seem to have provided a base or structure for building narratives. As if narratives were not created by human beings, but came to them in the form of dreams, and then we brought them to daily life. But interestingly, the stories are still detached from reality, not quite belonging to this realm.
- Speculations. And there are two main kinds of speculations – one is theories, still trying to explain our world, but not disguised as facts (and here it’s important to mention about the speculative nature of science). The other is speculations that are fictional concepts but grounded in the reality – as a base for a critical discussion about possible future (and here would fit unrealised architectural visions).
- Relation between seeing and knowing. How much is observed, how much is assumed, and the tension between the two. (And here I could go back to ego, and link that to phenomena of projection).
- Stories’ role in memorising. How our minds are set for stories. Not only is it natural for our brains to build narratives between separate elements, but also it is much varies to memorise knowledge in form of stories. Which links to passing wisdom and beliefs down generations by oral traditions, and circles back to myths about our world, and their role in our civilisations.
- Microcosm – just playing around with the idea that human mind brain resembles a universe which it’s endlessly trying to grasp
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I also want to use quotes the way Julia Cameron did in ‘The Artist’s Way’, not mentioning someone’s words in a text like in an academic essay, but rather going on with my own train of thoughts, like with a story, and showing quotes on the side, as a kind of backup, or even adding on some reflections and expanding the topic a bit more, and letting the mind play a bit putting puzzles together.
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