K.

MICHAEL HAYS: I'm going to give another example

of the architectural imagination at work.
There's a very famous study by an architecture historian
named Rudolf Wittkower called "Architectural
Principles in the Age of Humanism."
And it's a study of every villa that the Italian architect Andrea Palladio ever
built.
So let's imagine that Wittkower went with the students.
He probably visited all the villas in the northern part of Italy.
He may have measured them.
He and his students probably drew them.
And what he began to realize is that the villas, as different as they were,
had some deep structural diagram in common, some geometrical ordering
system that was not always immediately apparent,
but was latent and could be discovered through this activity of measuring
and drawing.
Some of the villas were simple farmhouses.
They were not decorated compared to the great urban villas in Italy.
Others were lavishly decorated, both on the inside and on the exterior.
Wittkower didn't look at any of that.
Some of the villas were made of different material-- stucco.
Some actually were made of more precious materials like stone.
Wittkower didn't see any of that.
All Wittkower cared about was this common diagram, this template.
And out of that template, he devised or he imagined the geometrical essence
of the Palladian villa.
And in his final diagram--
you can see it here--
he draws that diagram.
This is the architectural imagination at work.
There are several things we can get through this.
First of all, appearance is important.
Appearance, representation, but also something
deeper than surface appearance.
There's also a deeper diagrammatic structure.
Second of all, repetition is important.
Each of these villas have something in common,
but they're all variations on a single, common theme.
And third is the relationship between that template, that diagram,
and what we might want to call the architectural understanding,
how we understand that.
We can think of it this way.
When Wittkower draws that diagram and when we look at that diagram,
there's a kind of harmonious resonance.
There's a kind of vibration in our minds between that visual image and something
that we're starting to understand, some idea of a villa type,
that we're starting to understand.
And here is how the imagination, which we see in that diagram,
in that drawing, bridges the gap between the raw sense data of perception
and the architectural understanding itself.
Now we can be precise about the imagination.
It's one part of a three-part system.
At the lowest level, we might say, is our sensory experience--
our sight, our touch of the materials of a building.
Even maybe the sounds of the building, or maybe even the
smells of the stone and the stucco of the building.
But those arrive as raw sense data.
They're unencoded.
They're unprocessed.
And the understanding, which is at the highest level,
knows nothing of those raw sense data.
It has no way of scanning.
It has no way of matching up that sense data with anything
that the understanding can understand.
That's where the imagination comes in.
The imagination is the third thing that operates
in the space between the sense data and the perceptions of the building
and the architectural understanding.
And the work of the imagination, what it has the capacity to do, is schematize.
Remember that diagram of Wittkower.
He actually draws the deep structure of those villas
and that schematization, that deep structure--
that the understanding can scan.
The understanding has templates already available
that it can match to that geometrical schema.
Now, you might even want to say that because that schema is so rigorous
and because it is repeated, it has the appearance,
or it seems that it has universal validity.
And indeed, Wittkower thought that the Palladian diagram
did have universal validity.
We can think of it this way.
When the imagination presents its schema to the understanding,
it sets us on the path toward knowledge.
And whatever knowledge is, it will have something
to do with this interaction of the understanding and the imagination.
The important thing for us is that this is a specific kind
of architectural knowledge.
It comes from the experience of architectural sense data.
It's been schematized into an architectural diagram,
and the architectural understanding has scanned it.
In some ways, you might understand the imagination
and the understanding as opposed.
The imagination is temporal, the understanding is universal.
The imagination is multiple while the understanding is singular.
But the understanding is also passive.
It receives the imagination's input.
The imagination is active.
So we might say that the imagination organizes the sensuous manifold
according to organizing principles that can be received by the understanding.
And here we have the idea that architecture produces knowledge.