Name: The Architectural Imagination: Aesthetic Perception (HarvardX)
Uploaded: 2017-09-15T07:14:47.000Z
Duration: 6 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

K. MICHAEL HAYS: I'm in Gund Hall, which is the home of the Graduate

And I'm in the studio space, which is where the most intense activity takes

place of design, of analysis and research, of imagination.

We'll speak about the architectural imagination.

And I'm going to suggest that some concept like the imagination

is necessary if we want to treat architecture as a mode of knowledge.

The classical philosophers said, the soul

never thinks without phantasm, which is to say that thought needs a material

So we begin to think of the imagination as bridging the gap between perception

What's implied is that there is actually a space in the mind

The imagination is different from other mental processes

like perceiving or remembering insofar as to perceive something requires

And that's not required of the imagination.

And even to remember something-- the event or the object or the person--

it had to have already been there in order to remember.

The image isn't there until the imagination produces it.

The imagination is also different from a concept

because the imagination requires the materialization of thought.

For example, I can conceptualize freedom.

I can even explain to you what freedom is as a concept.

But it's very difficult to show you freedom.

In order to show you freedom, I would have to construct a picture.

Then I could help you imagine freedom in that materialization, in that scene,

So we should think of the imagination as the capacity

for producing images, the mental capacity to picture things.

And what we want to show is that there is a specific kind of imagination,

But you can already start to compare them nevertheless.

The other one is made of white stuff and glass, probably wood or steel.

It almost seems to be emerging from the earth.

Indeed, some scholars would say that it even compares itself to the landscape

It almost wants to become like a mountain.

Now, the other one is also very conscious of the landscape,

It doesn't emerge from the earth, but it kind of perches on the earth.

But both of them are conscious of the ground.

Already, the architectural imagination is starting to emerge.

And then we could also say they have something else in common.

They both have a kind of wrapper, which encloses a single volume.

Even though one has stone columns, one has steel columns,

even though the columns have different spacings,

the space in between the columns is important.

The proportion of space in between the columns and the rhythm of the columns

And then look at how the columns meet the horizontal beam,

In one case, there's a very articulated picture

of the joinery, the way the vertical column meets the entablature.

And there are several pieces in between that

make that transition from horizontal to vertical articulate.

Now, the other one doesn't have all those pieces.

But it almost seems like there's still great thought about the pieces.

But it's a kind of negation of all the articulation.

And yet, in the very negation, the intensity of that joint is still made.

They're both empty, rectangular volumes defined by a wrapper.

And the wrapper is articulated by columns

and space that have a geometry, a kind of geometrical, proportional system.

They both pay a lot of attention of how they meet the ground.

And they both pay a lot of attention about how they're in a landscape.

So what has happened is that we have constructed.

And what has started to emerge is a very particular kind of imagination

And we have adapted a set of assumptions about one building

to a set of perceptions about another building.

Now, what's implied here is that template of things, in some sense,

had to preexist our understanding of those buildings.

That set of architectural characteristics

that they share in common had to, in some sense, already be there when

This is nothing less than the architectural imagination at work.

And what we have arrived at is a fundamental instance

In the comparison, that set of assumptions emerged.

And it is as if it preexisted in order that you could