ARCHITECTURAL RECEPTION THEORY

ACSA ANNUAL MEETING 1990

BETWEEN CULTURE & ARCHITECTURE: ARCHITECTURAL RECEPTION THEORY :IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION

Julia W. Robinson , Department of Architecture College of Architecture & Landscape Architecture University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT Consideration of architecture as a cultural medium has a number of important implications for the conception of architecture as a discipline. Perhaps most important is that the designer is designing for and within a cultural framework. Combining the anthropological concerns to account for both etic (professional) and ernie (lay) perspectives with a current interest of many literary theoreticians for engaging a non-elite audience, a reception theory for architecture is born. In the terms of reception theory the made artifact is judged by the reception by its audience which suggests radical change for architectural education. The classroom would not be the forum for inculcation of the professional, etic view to the exclusion of the ernie attitudes of the wider culture. At present students at the end of their education are no longer capable of seeing the built world through the eyes of the ordinary person. The future professional would be able to see the world two ways. The professional perspective would offer an alternative view rather than a substitute one. In response to this, the elements of a culturally critical educational process are presented and some of the impediments to implementing this in architecture are discussed.

The acceptance of the notion that architecture is a medium for culture leads naturally to a consideration of the role that design, and thence architectural education play or ought to play within our society. 1 This is especially problematic in a pluralistic society where the cultural ideas are diverse and not easily summarized. Even so, the architectural environment exerts a profound influence upon society's perception of and action within the world that makes understanding the cultural role of architecture, and developing a coherent response to that role, an obligatory part of architectural education. The development of an architectural reception theory involves defining an appropriate relation between the professional designer and the cultural audience which is being designed for. 2 For architectural education, then, the challenge is to create a designer who can be sensitive to both the professional perspective and the lay perspective. Given the historical origins of architectural education in the master-apprentice learning process, there are particular difficulties in accomplishing this.

!heconsideration of culture in relation to design is a very broad topic, and frequent! y is seen as primarily a problem of Intercultural communication. However, it is propose-d in this paper that architectural education ought to create culturally responsive designers who can work within their own culture as cultural critics and that architectural education can suppon or hinder this. lL is assumed that developing the c ultural sensitivity of architects is a prerequisite not only to ~Ppropriate practice within their own society, (dealt with in this article) but also to understanding the problems of an International world.

~h~rd~r ~ develop the basis for defining the relation between designer and the cultural audience, there are a few terms th ach llas useful to introduce. The first, etic and e rnie, derive from the names given by linguists to differentiate between 1 e sounds of foreign languages as understood by native speakers (phonemics) and the sounds as described in the abstract ua~guage of the linguists themselves (phonetics). In anthropology these tenns have been used to characterize the 11 p erstanding of cultures by the members of the c ultures, the emic understanding, and the understanding by the roressional who is a cultural outsider, the etic understanding. In this article, we will apply these tenns in a slightly 235


different way to characterize within our own culture the perspective shared by all members (ernie) and the perspective shared by professionals (etic ). But there is a key difference in the application of these terms to architects practicing within their own culture which must be addressed, in that professionals are assumed to potentially have both the ernie perspective of the wider culture and the etic perspective of their profession. The process of architectural education, however, is presently predisposed to systematically replace the ernie perspective brought by the student with the professional etic view. A second and corollary idea to the emic/etic perspective is that of cullural relativism, the acceptance that the actions within a given culture or subculture must be understood within its own distinct value system. This does not mean that other values may not be brought to bear on the evaluation of the system in a wider context, but rather that the integrity of a culture requires that those studying it understand to what extent the outside assessment is irrelevant within it, and irrelevant to the understanding of it on its own terms. The concept of cultural relativity takes on a different form in the context of intracultural architectural practice than it has in study of cultures outside one's own, because the architect is at the same time an insider and an outsider of both the profession and the societal culture. But the current process of architectural education tends to reinforce an inappropriate attitude of exclusiveness and superiority of the professional perspective as a way to see built form. A third related idea is that of the holistic and atomistic perspective. These anthropological terms describe two ways of seeing the world, one in which things are seen as an entirety (in the sense of a hologram) and the other in which are seen as parts or atoms. Both views are understood to be essential to the understanding of culture. A premise of this paper is that the ernie cultural understanding of architecture is essentially holistic, being based in experience, in contrast to the etic professional view which is becoming increasingly abstract and atomistic, allowing the professional to gain some distance from his cultural formulation of the world. In most architectural schools the etic atomistic perspective is taught almost exclusively.

CULTURAL PROCESSES AND DESIGN: THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT Cultural ideas can be described as shared patterns of decision-making which are largely unconscious. With the maturing of the scientific method, and the development of the architectural profession , architects' designs became increasingly a conscious, rational, structured process of design choices, in contrast to vernacular design which used well-developed traditions to generate tried and true built form. 3 When architects worked with traditional craftsmen, the architects' conscious ideas were mediated by the traditions which carried the unconscious cultural mythology. By adopting a consciously controlled construction process, and abandoning the crafts, the modem movement created a rupture with the unconscious cultural past. Cultural messages have broad generally shared patterns, but are not always consistent with each other, and ¥e usually so taken for granted that they are not evaluated but simply acted upon. For example the cultural ideal of the family man conflicts with the cultural ideal of lhe carefree bachelor. Any individual may ignore these ideals, may choose one or the other, or may try to create a synthesis. These ideas and attitudes and their behavioral ramifications are myths expressed and reinforced in built form (e.g. the single family house versus the condominium). These myths are expressed in architectural forms as explanation of how people ought to be, how they ought to act, what they ought to find impressive, of who is important and who is unimportant, etc. To the extent that the architect is not consciously aware of these norms, they tend to drive design. Ideally, the architect is in touch with these ideas, but has developed ways to be critical toward them, and thus to create designs which not only respond to existing culture but which engage constructive change. Culture is primarily communicated through experience and tapped in an unconscious way. In our daily life the reasons we do things are not always clear to us, and for the most part this is of no particular concern. We must engage in actions, and what is the appropriate action is directly ascertainable through these cullural norms. Therefore, if we are foliowing convention and are asked to design a house, we do not have to question what is meant by the term itself, it seems selfevident. We know full well the normal arrangement of parts, etc. We associate in our minds the form' ' house'' with formal and ideological notions. The ideas we have about house become conscious to us when in attempting to folloW convention, the given situation calls our norms into question. So, for example, if the client has certain atypical desires, or if the site won't accommodate the standard solutions, the difference between the typical conception and the desired 236


conception is questioned and house form will be adjusted to fit the particular circumstance. This kind of gradual adjustment is typical of the way that cultural pauems evolve. If the ideas that at first seemed atypical become shared by a wider set of people, standard solutions will evolve that satisfy the new desires. Although these cultural processes are predominantly unconscious, this does not mean that they do not require conscious decision-making, nor that they are thoughtless. It simply means that most of the decision-making process is based on associational, experienced-based thinking which uses implicit norms. For the designer who would be more conscious of the factors which make a design, one of the important roles of the professional architectural etic perspective is that it makes available many different ways of subdividing and analyzing architectural form and content (e.g. geometry, history, structure, h.v.a.c.). Each perspective implies a different set of issues and values, and allows a different set of assumptions about buildings to be addressed. These abstractions are systems with principles and relationships not identical with the real world, that allow the metaphoric and analogic development of ideas which do not derive directly from widely shared cultural norms. It is by means of these abstractions that many architectural innovations occur. These allow the complexity of architectural form to be addressed in parts and reconfigured. These systems address the making of architecture. But the engagement of the poetic and mythic possibilities of architecture requires an involvement with the experiences of daily life in the physical world which we largely understand unconsciously. The application or exploration of the abstract etic architectural ideas, separated from an understanding of actual bodily movements, social relationships, and their symbolic implications will not generate an architecture which expresses the full potential of human experience. As a medium architecture has more than instrumental value, it also has emotional and aesthetic content which are clearly linked to unconscious associational thinking as well as to conscious, rational thought. In so far as we can make conscious our experiential knowledge we can use it in design. But because we are acting within a society that is pluralistic, we can no longer simply accept our own individual emotional and aesthetic responses as universal. We must seek to develop the mythological side of architecture in such a way that the cultural bias of an individual does not create a coercive architectural form which expresses a singular, limited perspective of what is appropriate. There may well be certain commonalities which operate cross-culturally, but these remain to be discovered and tested. At the present time our educational process creates a professional skilled in etic know ledge of the making of architecture, and not at all skilled in discovering and criticizing the cultural ideas we use. If the design process is to support the critical creation of cultural artifacts, rather than simply support the reinforcement of existing culture or the creation of culturally irrelevant design, this needs to be addressed in education. A CULTURALLY CRITICAL EDUCATION When cultural understanding is addressed in architectural education, it typically is dealt within only one part of the curriculum (some schools have history courses on vernacular design, others have courses on non western cultures, courses on behavior may address cultural issues, technology courses may look at traditional designs, courses on professional practice may cover community design process). And for the most part, cultural issues are dealt with as information rather than as a way of engaging the design process. For culture to be fully integrated, it must be incorporated in multiple aspects of instruction. A culturally critical design education involves educal.ion of three kinds: 1. developing appreciation of the cultural ernie perspective that we may share with the members of our own culture, understanding how cultural ideas come out of daily experiences, and creating ways to see culture in a new light and to evaluate it 2. developing the etic perspective and understanding its relation to cultural criticism and constructive change, 3. developing knowledge about subcultures and cultures other than the student's own, and 4. developing a commitment to a critical and socially responsible design process which involves creating and using an empirical knowledge base, and learning skills in dealing with clients and users of all kinds. ihis approach to education fits in well with the changing paradigm in education and practice, that of the shift from a :Ystem of master-apprentice learning to one of an explicit knowledge-based form of learning, and the introduction of peseru:ch as an important part of the justification of architectural decision-making. But the implications of this new parad~gm for the instructional methods used in profes ion a I education are just beginning to be understood. The shifting aa~adtgm is, in effect, a change from the perception of architecture as an art to that of architecture as a cultural artifact, 11 from the designer as a person responsible to create a personal artistic expression to that of the designer as a person 237


responsible to and for the cultural context. This is not to say that architecture ought not also to be art, but that it must be understood to be not a formal medium separate from its cultural message, but as a medium which embodies the cultural

message. Perhaps the most difficult problem faced by architectural education is dealing with the existing culture of the school environment. The ernie perspec tive, if not addressed, tends to support cultural stasis. In order to criticbe sufficiently critical of the ernie perspective, it must be revealed and its possibilities and limitations explored. But as stated earlier typicaJiy, the ernie, cultural perspective the beginning student brings is replaced by the "correct and superior" eti~ architectural perspective thus making it diffiuclut to confront the students ernie beliefs. And what is more problematic is that this substitution is done in a process which has coercive tendencies. The primary locus of potential coercion of the student is the design studio, and there are a number of factors inherent to the studio tradition which contribute to the process. Before we discuss these, it will be useful to look at studies of the practices of religious groups to discover some of the ways that ideas can be transmitted. Two processes of introducing people to religious groups are described by Pilarzyk. 4 One approach "involves a transitional change" in which the "former identity" is extended or modified, in which the new ways of thinking are incorporated within the existing meaning system or within the past life and identity, and in which the new system is presented in a segmented way which allows for reinterpretation of subjective reality. The other, more coercive approach "demands drastic changes," negation of the former identity, radical reorganization within a new meaning system. It involves an ''all-encompassing absolutist organization principle for the radical reinterpretation of subjective reality. " 5 Kanter defines six characteristic processes by which recruits develop commitment to a religious group: sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence. 6 Sacrifice and Investment means that membership in the group, being costly is' 'not lightly regarded, nor likely to be given up easily.' ' 7 Renunciation in Kanter's terms requires "the relinquishing of relationships that are potentially disruptive to group cohesion." This means that " loyalties that might conflict with members' group obligations and block potential satisfactions are regulated by the community.' ' 8 Communion is the development of a sense of community from shared experiences and participation in the group. This creates the loyalty to the group. Essentially a constructive process, it can be used to create social pressure to inhibit nonconformity. Mortification, on the other hand "involves the submission of private states to social control, the exchanging of a former identity of one defined and formulated by the community. 9 This is used to "strip away aspects of an individual's previous identity, to make him dependent on authority for direction and to place him in a position of uncertainty with respect to his role until he learns and comes to accept the norms of the group.'' 10 • Transcendence gives "meaning and direction to the community by means of ideological systems and authority structures. " 11 These allow one to identify with a higher purpose which justifies the sacrifices one must make to be a member. While development of religious commitment is not fully analogous to that of developing commitment to the architectural profession, some important parallels can be drawn. Certain aspects of the development of religious commitment described above have largely positive implications, but others do not. Clearly, there is no conscious intention to coerce the architectural student, and every education is, like religious conversion, a process of transformation. A question is whether the experience is or ought to be, in Pilarzyk's terms, radical or transitional. Kanter finds that there are three separate reasons for which a group requires the development of commitment: continuance, cohesion and control. 12 • Like religions, every profession exists for the continuance of its values and methods, The nature of that continuance is what is at issue. Radical transformation of the student tends to support wholesale acceptance of a new value system without the questioning of elements implicit in a transitional change. The cohesion of members of a profession is a requisite to its very existence. On the other hand, that cohesion needs to based not on conformity, but on appreciation of individual difference. Finally, a profession needs to exert a certain kind of control over its members. But this control ought to take place as a mutually agreed upon consensus based on conscious acceptance of explicit group standards rather than as a blind conformity to normative practices based on desire for acceptance or fear of criticism. Certain of the attributes of the studio experience are especially problematic with regard to a culturally critical education. These are the assumption of ignorance in the incoming student, the traditional authoritarian role of the studio critic modeled in the master-apprentice relationship, the use of the system of criticism, the creation of a strong studio and school culture, the tradition of the charette, and the emphasis on formal issues separate from other issues. The process of introducing the student into the culture of the profession is usually accomplished by having a group of students work intimately with the studio master. The students spend large amounts of time and energy on their work, most 238


often in the studio setting, isolated from their living environments, and then present the work they have done to their studio critics for review. The students' intimate ideas and primitive design efforts are first discussed privately with their studio critic, and then, when the designs are refined, they are presented to the group, and commented upon by the critic and also by other students. If the studio critic has made the criteria for evaluation clear to the student, and if the reviews are handled tactfully and constructive criticism is given (which explains what kind of change is desired), a supportive atmosphere results. However, if the critic operates with implicit criteria which are not clear to the student, and/or if the critic offers only negative feedback, the process of review may easily become one of mortification in which the student is subjected to public humiliation, of a minor or major sort. This negative process may create the situation in which the student is in the kind of double bind described by Galanter, whereby the group, led by the critic "acts like a psychological pincer, promoting distress while at the same time providing relief... The group promotes behavioral norms that may expose a member to potential distress. Then, ... the member comes to feel that the relief of this distress depends on fidelity to the group. This in turn makes the member more responsive to the demands of the group and its leadership'' .13 Embarrassment or public criticism, whether in the studio or on juries can serve to humiliate students. This can be especially powerful if it occurs when students have been on charette and are in physical stress. If a studio is led by an authoritarian instructor, what may develop is a situation in which a dependence upon the instructor for judgement and praise suppresses the student's own sense of judgement. Clearly not all studios participate in such negative criticism, but even those of us who attempt to create supportive studio environments can see how easily aspects of the studio system may partially create the mortification described above. When the etic perspective is allied to the mortification process, the student loses confidence in his/her past perspectives, adopting instead those sanctioned by the group. The ernie view is thus understood to be unproductive and becomes devalued. The ernie perspective per se is not necessarily better than the tic perspective, but it ought to be one of the active tools for design. Contributing to this may be an additional factor of the relative isolation of the student from everyday living, and the relative isolation, in many schools, of architecture from other disciplines. The process of creating a distinct and allconsuming studio culture and professional culture has the advantage of creating a cohesive group of people. On the other hand, to the extent that it interferes with personal relationships with those outside the professional realm, it may contribute to an alienation from the personal support systems which allow deviance from studio or professional group norms. To the extent that it promotes professional chauvinism it may tend to devalue the views of nonprofessionals, or peoples of other cultures, other classes, and other subcultures. And insofar as the studio takes priority over personal life, students may miss opportunities to participate in activities which would make them more complete human beings, desensitizing them to the importance of linking architectural knowledge to the experiences of daily life. The studio group should be one of the important social groups in which a student participates, but not the only one, nor should it dominate the students' time so that they cease to engage in normal outside activities. CONCLUSION Responding to a reception theory for architecture, in which architecture is understood to be a cultural artifact, and the design process is understood to be a dialogue between an architect and the broad cultural audience, architectural education must develop a student who is knowledgeable about and sensitive to cultural issues. Such an education requires first, validation of the experiences and beliefs a studem brings to architectural education. Subsequently, as professional knowledge is imparted, it should be linked to the cultural norms in this society and in other cultures, as well as to possible changes which might be desirable. Ways of revealing the taken-for-granted cultural ideas and patterns need to be developed along with the critical skills to propose alternatives. The myths which are projected in built form need to be understood, and ways need to be explored for the poetic possibilities of daily life to be embodied in architecture. This can only take place in an atmosphere where the student and faculty work together not as master and apprentice, but as explorers of knowledge. The leadership of the faculty must not be tied to the authority of the person, or the authority ~the profession, but will be subject to the authority of knowledge. In such an environment design decision-making will supponed by argument and knowledge about cultural issues. Thus the cultural sensitivity of the students can be made to flourish and their critical abilities can be brought to bear in design innovation.

239


NOTES 1

Culture is here seen as a mental construct, shared by a group of people, which is perpetuated and manifested directly in behavior, and indirectly by means of artifacts, see Hoebel E. A. ''On the Nature of Culture,'' in Shapiro, H. L Man. Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. .,

2

For an argument and explanation for a reception theory and of architecture as a medium for culture see Robinson, J. W. ''Towards an Architectural Reception Theory: A Dialogue of Etic and Ernie Approaches,'' paper presented at the Built Form and Culture Conference, Tempe,AZ, 1989.

3

For a description of this see Perez-Gomez, A., Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 1983.

4

Pilarzyk, T. ''Conversion and Alternation Processes in the Youth Culture: A Comparative Analysis of Religious Transformations" in Bromley, D. G. and Richardson, J. T. (eds.) The Brainwashing/Del)rofUammini ContrQ: versy: Sociological. Psychological. Legal and Historical Perspectives. New York:Edwin Mellen Press, 1983 pp 51-72.

5

This is a loose paraphrase of Pilarzykis table describing two types of religious transformation in the Youth Culture: Sectarian Conversion and Cultic Alternation (op. cit. p55). I find Pilarzyk's choice of terms confusing and so have not used them in this article.]

6

Kanter, R. M. Commitment and Community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972, discussed in Enroth op. cit pp 166-183.

7

Kanter, op. cit. p72.

8

Kanter, op. cit p. 82 & pp. 82-3.

9

Kanter, op. cit p. 74.

1

°Kanter, op. cit., p. 103.

11

Kanter, op. cit. p. 126.

12

Kanter, op.cit.pp67-70.

13

Galanter, M. Cults, Faith, Healing and Coercion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p93]

240