“Soul receives from soul that knowledge,
therefore not by book nor from tongue.
If knowledge of mysteries come after
emptiness of mind, that is
illumination of heart.”
- Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī
The Brief, the Question and the Story
Gene Fowler (American Author) is famously quoted as saying that “Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of paper until drops of blood appear on your forehead.” Well nowadays I think its a digital screen that summons the blood. And I’m sure most if not all architects and designers have felt the numbing pressure of staring into this blank emptiness. This void where by some miracle a design, a piece of writing or an act of creativity miraculously, as my son would say, ‘spawns’ from.
We however do not create from nothingness, there is always an idea, a question or a need that requires or calls for our engagement and so sparks our creativity. As architects this is usually a brief stipulating the need for curated space, thereby initiating a question and setting the architect on a path of enquiry. Secondly there exists a location within which our intervention occurs. Most often this is a physical site with defined geological, climatological, sociological, economical, etc., etc., parameters. Thus we find that in the initial phase of a design three elements enter into relationship; ‘the void’ which we may consider as the imaginal, ’the need/question’ as the brief and ‘the space/location’ of the intervention.
Sticking with the writing analogy, a writer has to be a keen observer who collects stories, from noticing the smallest mannerism in passers by to those long drawn out historical tales that are so often a consequence of a Sunday lunch. In a similar way an architect collects stories, from the way a window conducts light into a space, or the flow of traffic in a doctor’s rooms, to navigating the streets and canals of Venice. These life experiences are the stories designers gather and amass in their continuously evolving personal frame of reference.
So when we are faced with design decisions how do we know which story is the appropriate one, and when? If we have accumulated thousands of stories over the years of our experience how do we choose the correct narrative that our design must follow, given that for an average house we are faced with more than one hundred thousand decisions before project completion?
Firstly we have to identify the parameters or constraints that apply to our design. For example what are the regulations we have to adhere to, how many people will this building cater for, what is our budget, who is our client and what pallette of materials are available to us?
After this crucial analysis we have to interpret our findings into a design. But design is not a linear process, its more like a dance following a spiral trajectory. From the very onset of the project we begin to relate to the project, making subtle unconscious associations, both to the requirements of the brief as well as to our own frame of reference.
So far we should have a set of notes and scribbles, and perhaps a detailed site analysis, some ideas yes, but no design yet. It is at this point that we would typically engage our imagination and begin creating our design.
Two Challenges to our Thinking
The Mundus Imaginalis
Let’s now step out of the dominant western idea that the imagination is a subjective creative act that stirs from within us. More than just a step, I propose a double jete into two concepts radically different from our habitual understanding. Firstly through Henry Corbin, a scholar of Islamic mysticism, the ancient Sufi idea that imagination is and comes from an ontologically real realm that is not subjective or objective but interdependent and inter-relational. And secondly that when we think about the act of relating to, or entering into relationship with something, like we would a design, or enjoying the beauty of a flower, a tree or a sunset, we enter the field of heart and soul.
In his studies of the mystical branch of Islam Corbin discovered the Mundus Imaginalis, as the source of imagination. This is a world the Sufis believe exists between Plato’s archetypal forms (Eidos) and our reality of gross matter. We, Corbin says, engage with the Mundus Imaginalis through our faculty of imagination which indeed becomes the organ of imaginative perception. Through Corbin we are presented with a re-visioning of imagination; as a plane of existence which is separate yet intimately related to us, who’s correspondence we moderns have falsely come to believe as our own creative ideas. Subsumed by the ego, the genius or daemon has lost its wings of inspiration.
On this last point, let me clarify that strictly speaking this framework creates two different aspects of imagination; namely true imagination which is active and engaging and comes to us, by initiating a reciprocal relationship between us and the imaginal. This inter-relational imaginatio vero also bridges the intellect (mind) and sensation (body), thereby becoming a mediating force which facilitates correlation between subject and object, knower and the known. Importantly for us as architects, this reunification results in a hermeneutics which not only reveals the true essence of reality, it also provides us access to otherness and possibilities beyond our frame of reference.
Thus by means of an ontologically real imagination coming towards us from “outside” the “understanding” of our ego consciousness we are no longer limited by our historicity (frame of reference). This access to otherness makes the designer less of a creator and more like a conductor which allows architecture to affect and participate in its own creation. Context, need, designer and designed engage in a system of active dialogue facilitated by the ontogenic imagination.
The second aspect of imagination, which since the enlightenment era has become our default mode, is fantasy thinking commonly associated to daydreaming. Solipsistic in nature, this fabrication is a product of the mind and can only draw from that which is within consciousness and syntonic with ego ideology. Here we are limited by what we know and what we have experienced. This inferior form of imagination reinforces subjective ideology and cannot invoke otherness or embrace the unknown.
2. Soul as Inter-Relatedness
The other radically unconventional idea James Hillman, Jungian analyst and founder of Archetypal Psychology, theorized is; soul as less a thing that we have, but rather the development/expansion/blossoming of how we relate to and experience this world. Soul for Hillman is the field that we simultaneously engage with and create as we become more and more conscious of this world. This way of relating to the world the Sufi’s considered as the “thought of the heart”; a vital requirement to not only see the true nature of things (archetypal nature of architecture), but also to discover the divine essence actively at work around us (true imagination). This way of soulful engagement and feeling into the world has, since the time of Descartes, been lost to our empirically orientated western perspective. But not to the poets! For John Keats in a moment of utmost clarity wrote, “this world is the vale of soul making.” And if soul making is the purpose of this world, then how we as architects think about and understand soul and the imagination will determine whether our buildings and the spaces they generate are alive and soulful or silent and dead.
Embodying of the Image
Embodied Imagination teaches us to engage and relate with this real plane of imagination. By embodiment of the image we set aside our habitual mode of understanding; feeling into the image/space/environment, open the otherness of imagination, we have access to more information. Allowing the body to conduct the images also activates the “thought of the heart”; bringing mind soul and body into one active system. As images ‘settle’ in the body, otherness enters our system thus allowing us to step outside of our habitual consciousness. The body then becomes a composite of living environments, learning and adapting without the subjugation of the mind. This process of being with the image, of embodying the imagination, I propose will make our architecture more adaptable, more fluid and more an expression of soul.
Comments