The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics QUOTES

1 " As students in the 1950s we were conditioned into despising the excesses of baroque/rococo architecture; that is, until we were reprogrammed by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Slade lectures at Cambridge. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

2 " What Zeki suggests is that a principle function of art is to reveal the order and constancy which underpins the fast-moving events of life. It enables us to stand back from the rush of incidents to contemplate what T.S. Eliot called ‘the still point of the turning circle’. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

3 " However, it is on the grand scale of cities like Amsterdam or Bruges and towns like Goslar that the archetypal contest between order and anarchy is played out with gusto. They are a kind of parable, externalising the triumph of order and harmony over dissonance, remembering that harmony depends as much on clash as correspondence. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

4 " One effect of all this is that towers, especially when associated with religious buildings, carry a powerful symbolic charge which greatly adds to their informational weight. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

5 " Buildings are the unavoidable art, whether the high art of the architectural masterpiece or the rich vernacular heritage of villages, towns and cities. Their forms and details are absorbed mostly on the nonconscious level, yet they weave their spell on the mind without our consent. They inﬂuence mood and demeanour, especially when they tap in to the subterranean currents of archetypal symbolism. On this level they can transmit subliminal messages of reassurance. // At the level of aesthetics per se , can we justify the belief that there is a social value which extends beyond merely offering transient pleasure? "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

6 " Buildings are the unavoidable art, whether the high art of the architectural masterpiece or the rich vernacular heritage of villages, towns and cities. Their forms and details are absorbed mostly on the nonconscious level, yet they weave their spell on the mind without our consent. They inﬂuence mood and demeanour, especially when they tap in to the subterranean currents of archetypal symbolism. On this level they can transmit subliminal messages of reassurance. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

7 " If the new building is generally recognisable as falling within a mnemotype category then that mnemotype is adjusted to accommodate the novel elements in the building. The mnemotype can be considered as a template with adjustable edges. Each new architectural experience fractionally changes our perception of the whole spectrum of architecture in much the same way that T.S. Eliot considered every new poem to change the whole corpus of poetry. However, a building which allegedly belongs to a given mnemotype, but which threatens radically to change the shape of the template, is frequently greeted with hostility and rejected as an aberration. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

8 " …echo the Gerard Manley Hopkins line: ‘likeness tempered with difference’. So, the attainment of knowledge has afﬁnities with the perception of harmony – order transcending complexity to establish a new concept with its unique elegance. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

9 " The question to round off this exploration of townscape is this: does the magic of places gradually drain away through familiarity? How do we counter those who claim that the worm that corrupts our delight in cities is habituation ? Fine for visitors, but what about inhabitants who see their town or city day after day? // The answer lies in the nature of emotional reward. If habituation really was the killer, then we would not bother to hear repeats of Brahms or Britten; we would have no wish to return to Florence or Prague. The fact is, the more places engage with the emotions the more resilient they are to erosion by habituation. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

10 " It also needs to be remembered that symbolism can affect an aesthetic response in a negative way. To one person the fortress-like chateau towering above the town of Saumur is ‘picturesque’; to another it is a symbol of the tyranny visited on the populace by the military aristocracy and, as such, undermines the aesthetic outcome. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

11 " One of the most poignant of architectural metaphors is to be seen in the Holocaust Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind (Figure 107). Its form abounds in sharp points from the plan to the shape of openings. Its cladding in zinc copper titanium alloy adds menace to the razor-sharp edges and angles. The apparently arbitrary positioning of openings in the elevations originate in lines connecting the addresses of Jewish victims of the Nazis across Berlin. Vigorously clashing shapes put the ﬁnishing touch to a building which is a most eloquent memorial to the suffering of the Jews in the Second World War. It is the architectural equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica . "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

12 " There is no obvious survival advantage in experiencing these views, just as our delight in walking the streets of any well-preserved medieval town has nothing directly to do with improving our adaptive capability. The fact is that there is a whole realm of emotional experience which seems to refer back to a pre-rational relationship between humans and the natural environment. This is what archetypal symbols are all about – ‘arche’, the beginning. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

13 " Metaphor avoids the representational image and leaves the percipient with work to do to unravel the connection. It is counterpoint on the emotional level. Making that connection is a creative act and thus a form of aesthetic experience. Where the correspondence is on the level of simile rather than metaphor it runs the danger of being counter-productive. One would avoid a burger bar shaped like a burger. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

14 " The human mind is genetically attuned to pick out points of afﬁnity within the complex stream of sensory information reaching the brain, because pattern equals redundancy. A pattern is a way of ‘chunking’ an array of information so that it takes up less attentional space. […] The more the mind can store information in this way, the more free capacity it has available to cope with novelty and surprise. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

15 " These matters all impact on the theme of aesthetic reward. One of the underlying principles here is that the aesthetic spark is generated across the gap between order and complexity, between the known and unknown, the here and the there, the deep past and the present, and the ‘now’ and the ‘then’. Scenes that encapsulate these fundamental yet connected opposites make an emotional impact that is impervious to the erosion of time. The city has the potential to be the epitome of harmony; a giant projection of the principle of the reconciliation of opposites. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

16 " ...in the tonic chord of G-major there is a signiﬁcant level of clash between the wave proﬁles of the notes, but the rate of overlap or synchronisation exceeds the rate of clash, so order succeeds in outweighing complexity. In this one chord is played out the archetypal battle between order and anarchy. What matters is that there is a signiﬁcant rate of conﬂict between consonance and dissonance. Harmony incorporates dissonance but synchrony outweighs conﬂict . This idea goes back at least as far as the medieval scholar Boethius who deﬁned consonance or harmony as ‘a uniﬁed concordance of sounds dissimilar in themselves’. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

17 " …the underpinning principle behind aesthetic experience is that of complexity giving way to orderliness. Clash is an essential component of aesthetic perception. Resolution of clash delivers aesthetic reward. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

18 " Aesthetic perception involves changing frames of reference in order to see the hidden logic and orderliness behind what at ﬁrst may seem random and strange. One of the selective pressures behind the development of the arts may be as a mechanism for developing mental agility; a way of rehearsing the capacity to change a mindset in the face of novelty and surprise. This leads directly to the mental shake-up which occurs whenever we are faced with fairly radical departures from the norm in terms of art and architecture: ‘the shock of the new’. It is this protean factor which enables us to adjust our mental models to accommodate such new evocations of art and architecture. As such it is an essential component of the fabric of aesthetic perception. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

19 " This is the essence of cognitive adjustment; the continuous adjustment of the environmental mental model to achieve and even-better fit between expectations and reality; to push back the boundaries of uncertainty. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

20 " Buildings are the pressure cookers of cultural change. "

― , The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics