By: Barie Fez-Barringten

Barie Fez-Barringten — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:24:53 +0000

Of course, architecture is an art!
And, here’s why!

The science supporting the stasis to architecture being an art:
”architecture is the making of metaphors”
The science supporting the stasis that architecture is the making of metaphors; resolving why architecture is an art; Architecture is an art because it too makes metaphors. The many facets of metaphor and art.

By Barie Fez-Barringten

http://www.bariefez-barringten.com
20,071 words on 40 pages

The below is predominantly developed from a study of “Metaphors and Thought” by Andrew Ortony, and, is in addition to over forty years of my work about “architecture as the making of metaphors” (please see background after the monograph for your information).

The commonality of all arts is that they express thought in terms of their peculiar craft and thus they (all arts) are technically metaphoric, metaphors because they transfer, carry-over and express one thing (some idea) in terms of another(the craft). {Parenthetically, there is no doubt that craft itself derives from ideas and concepts and within each is a sub-metaphor}. The sculptor who finds the figure as he malls the block is where the craft and the material inform the artist. The splashes of paint to canvas by Jackson Pollack even prevented any slow and deliberate cognition until the process was complete. Mies van der Rohe belittles his forms by simply ascribing his end result to being faithful to the materials and their properties. While all art is not expressed as a linguistic metaphor all arts are metaphoric. Likewise, if architecture is the making of metaphors what are the linguistic, psychological, and cognition science’s commonalities between architecture and metaphors? This monograph is linguistic analogy transferring from linguistic, psychological and cognitive fields to art and architecture what has been scientifically studied. This is the “stasis” (the state of equilibrium {equipoise} or inactivity caused by opposing equal forces) of the controversy of architecture being an art; that if architecture behaves, acts, looks and works like art than it too must be an art. Why? Because it, too, makes metaphors, and those metaphors are varied in depth, kind, scope and context. It is the stasis because it is where art and architecture meet. The metaphor is the conceptual focal point. While many claim that the architect is the “techne” artist being a crafts man point has been conceptual and so useful as to bridge, carry-over and provide both artist and architect a common authority over the making of the built environment. As stasis, Architecture as the making of metaphors enables the center of the dispute to be argued with common purpose. So this is a stasis in definition which concedes conjecture. While there may be other concepts justifying the relationship between art and architecture the metaphor is the stasis, common ground and commonality apparent to me. It not only is apparent but I have found has wide and broad applications to a variety of arts and architectural definitions, practices and contexts. There may have been a time when the architect was the “master builder” and the lead craftsman but that is only true by his skill in drawing, design and specifying and not his skill as master carpenter.
Before solidifying our hypothesis about architecture and metaphors we both compared architecture to the art of sculpture reflecting Christina’s work as a sculptress and my work as an architect and designer. It soon became apparent that while we could easily agree that buildings were “sculptural”,” colorful”,” lyrical”, “graceful”, ”rhythmic” etc. these were illusive and neither a field, base, or a true commonality to all the arts, including sculpture and architecture; so what was it?
The commonality of all arts is that they technically express something in terms of their peculiar craft and thus they are metaphoric. However technically metaphoric, how does architecture conceptually make metaphors and is there an influence between the technical and the conceptual architectural metaphor?
“If the walls could only speak”; they do! Are you listening?

In 1967, during the series of colloquia at Yale on art, Irving Kriesberg had spoken about the characteristics of painting (art) as a metaphor. It seemed at once that this observation was applicable to architecture (since scholars have long proclaimed that architecture was an art) and to the design of occupiable forms. An appeal to Paul Weiss drew from him the suggestion that we turn to English language and literature in order to develop a comprehensive, specific, and therefore usable definition of metaphor. But it soon became evident that the term was being defined through examples without explaining the phenomenon of the metaphor; for our purposes it would be essential to have evidence of the practical utility of the idea embodies in the metaphor as well as obvious physical examples. However, since then, in 1977, a group of leading philosophers, psychologist, linguists, and educators gathered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to participate in a multi disciplinary conference on metaphor and thought which was attended by nearly a thousand people. Our symposium at Yale was had a smaller attended and our proceedings were transcribed and later in 1971 partially published in Main Currents in Modern Thought. 1979 research has been completed and documents in Andrew Ortony’s compendium book on metaphor and thought to advance this metaphoric comparison.
With all the controversy around “knowing”; how do we know we know and the inaccuracy of language and dubious nature of scientific conclusions I have written over twenty monographs about architecture as the making of metaphors? This is the first with the sciences of linguistic, psychology and cognition definitions of the metaphor and there fore a set of facts by which to base our comparison. It is my hope that these commonalities will provide substantive reasons to allow the metaphor linking architecture to metaphors as my theorem: “architecture is the making of metaphors”. “If art is the making of metaphors and architecture is an art then it too must make metaphors. But until now aside form this logic we have not shown the informal logic, argument and evidence of this proposition.
The below is an excerpt form my monograph of paradigms and axioms about architecture based on Metaphor and Thought. In each of the below cases I have fist paraphrased the scientist’s conclusions and based on a notable commonality to architecture described an architectural process or product in the terms of each finding. Out these comparisons there came 3.0 topoi (A traditional theme or motif; a literary convention.) which we can use to describe architecture.

1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon
Generative metaphor and the “parte”. In his paintbrush as pump discussion as a metaphor Schon claims that by attaching to the paintbrush the way of a pump the researchers were able to better improve the design of the paintbrush as an instrument which pumps paint on the surface. By describing painting in an unfamiliar way they were able to make dominant what was already somewhat known. They then saw the brush as a pump. Before then they seemed to be different things now they were the same. To arrive at this conclusion they had to observe the working of the brush and make the observation and then apply it to the mechanism. The paintbrush was now seen as a pump and the act of painting, pumping. Schon refers to this a generative metaphor.
The generative metaphor is the name for a process of symptoms of a particular kind of seeing-as, the “meta-pherein” or “carrying –over” of frames or perspectives from one domain of experience to another. This process he calls generative which many years earlier 2.0 WJ Gordon called the Metaphoric Way of Knowing and 2.1 Paul Weiss called associations.

n this sense both in interior design and architecture after assimilating the program the very first step in the design process is to develop a “parte’ (An ex parte presentation is a communication directed to the merits or outcome of a proceeding …it’s the resolution of the argument consisting of claims, inferences, evidence and warrants to the inference) .It is a “top-down” approach later followed by designs which meet the parte. The parte may follow the design process and be presented to sell the product.

Commercial retail shops maximize both visual and physical access to their merchandise by the use of glass and positioning entrances convenient to potential shoppers’ paths of travel. Attached or detached the idea of the shop as a flickering flame and welcoming transformed shops prior image as formidable container into which one ventured for surprise and possible revelation. With this is in mind designers of malls extend this accessibility to nodes on highways to be close to their prime markets. Commercial retail is now perceived as an attractive recreational experience and as such provides shoppers with a secondary perception of the metaphor; shoppers now “carry-over” from play, rest and relaxation to fulfilling their needs and necessities. “Michael Angelo” mall in Qatar is designed in a Renaissance style with a huge domed entry, shop facades and themes of the period, paintings, sculptures and decoration reminding patrons that they are as royalty and in the lap of luxury. This was also adopted by the Loews theatre chain when all of their theatres were decorated with red velvet wallpaper, huge mahogany Tudor chairs; chandeliers, plush Aubusson rugs, beatiful crystal and porcelain lamps and accessories. During the depression and recovery patrons would come and spend the day in the theater (Palace was not just the name of one of the down town theaters but its description) to not only see the movie, but buy refreshments and lounge in the many beatiful parlors and lounges.

In the middle of the twentieth century William Levitt revolutionized and created the home building business as an industry applying mass production of the home ideal containing what the Park Ave penthouses had; built in closets, complete kitchens with dishwashers, and an even better, an attached garage. Not only that but every single house was identical so that all were part of a harmonious single minded community. It was called Levittown, the miracle suburb on Long Island that opened the way for the middle class to move out of New York City. They came to escape crowds and own their own home, cook with their own appliances and mow their own lawns. They had GI loans in hand, babies on the way, and a ‘50s brand of pioneering spirit.

Similar stories can be told of the way the modern office building was catapulted by the invention of the fly–wheel elevator by Otis and the conversion form iron to steel for building structures to increase real estate profits in as many as there are layers by building office space in layers up to the sky as zoning, elevator and engineering would allow.

3.0 “Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning, 2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky of Northwestern University and published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of Chantilly, Virginia

4.0 WWW; “In Europe the Grand Central Railroad Terminal were built and then a clone brought to New York City as part of the Park Ave Manhattan Development project including ten underground floors bringing freight, shopping, auto parking, etc underground and into the center of the city providing a hub extending from the thirties up to the nineties under Park Ave. This grand scheme was only partially carried out but forever transformed Park Ave from a boulevard of swanky three story mansions to a sophisticated high rent district of high-rise residences.
The first Grand Central Terminal was built in 1871 by shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. A “secret” sub-basement known as M42 lies under the Terminal, containing the AC to DC converters used to supply DC traction current to the Terminal designed to replicate the galleried hall of a 13th-century Florentine palace.
The train shed, north and east of the head house, had two innovations in U.S. practice: the platforms were elevated to the height of the cars, and the roof was a balloon shed with a clear span over all of the tracks. In order to accommodate ever-growing rail traffic into the restricted Midtown area, William J. Wilgus, chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad took advantage of the recent electrification technology to propose a novel scheme: a bi-level station below ground. Arriving trains would go underground under Park Avenue, and proceed to an upper-level incoming station if they were mainline trains or to a lower-level platform if they were suburban trains. In addition, turning loops within the station itself obviated complicated switching moves to bring back the trains to the coach yards for servicing. Departing mainline trains reversed into upper-level platforms in the conventional way. Necessity being the mother of invention burying electric trains underground brought an additional advantage to the railroads: the ability to sell above-ground air rights over the tracks and platforms for real-estate development. With time, all the area around Grand Central saw prestigious apartment and office buildings being erected, which turned the area into the most desirable commercial office district of Manhattan”.
In each of the above instances a metaphor was created by attaching another concept to the primary function. Once the projects were thought of in that added way the metaphor was born and under it the many metaphorical spin-offs and sub metaphors. Not to mention the metaphor of the Empire State and the overall iconic image of Manhattan and it’s New York State. Even today when we say New York we mean downtown Manhattan. The city is” being pumped” by its metaphors.

1.2 The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy.

1.2.1 A dead metaphor is one which really does not contain any fresh metaphor insofar as it does not really “get thoughts across”; “language seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone’s else’s thoughts”.
The landscape is replete with an infinite number of inane replicas which render readers dull, passive and disinterested (How many times will you read the same book?) Mass housing, commercial office buildings and highways are the main offenders leaving the owner designed and built residence, office, factory, fire station, pump house, as unique and delightful relief’s in an otherwise homogenized context. The reader stops reading because it is the same as before. Not reading the copy yet seeing the copy and the collective of copies focuses rather on the collective as the metaphor as the overall project which also may be “dead”.
In its time, Levittown’s uniqueness and the sub-structures sameness were its’ metaphor. It was alive and today still lives as new residents remodel upgrade and exhume their “dead” to become a “living” metaphor.
Disregarding this, the architects of public housing created dead metaphors and blamed the lack of pride of ownership for their failure. In revitalization teams of revivalist have discovered there is more than turf and proprietorship. Peculiarization, personalization and authentication are required for a metaphor to live. In this is the art of making metaphors for the architect of public works. His metaphor must “read” the cultural, social and rightness of the metaphor’s proposed context. In modern architecture no one was better able than Phillip Johnson in his Seagram Building and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Johnson’s early influence as a practicing architect was his use of glass; his masterpiece was the Glass House (1949) he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly influential work. The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already sketched in initial form by Johnson’s mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry, proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection. Johnson was the head of my Yale thesis jury and my primary design associate on a project in Puerto Rico and when I returned to Manhattan he invited me to work with him on the design of Roosevelt Island.

Defining the operation of metaphor Reddy says that 1.2.2 “a conduit is a minor framework which overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads. There are also individual pipes which allow mental content to escape into, or enter from, this ambient space. Thoughts and feelings are reified into an external 1.2.3 “idea space” and where thoughts and feelings are reified in this external space, so that they exist independent of any need for living human beings to think or feel them”. This most closely resembles works of architecture and what goes inside and outside works. “Somewhere we are peripherally aware that words do no really have insides (“it is quit foreign to common sense to think of words as having “insides” ……………major version of the metaphoric which thoughts and emotions are always contained in something”)
In his examples one can see a variety of putting ideas onto paper meaning that the ideas are out of the head of the creator and onto paper to be read and then transferred.

Architecturally this is best reflected in the example pointed out by Vincent Scully describing the geometry of urban blocks and the location of building masses that reflect one anther is geometry to sharply define the volume and mass of the block and experience of city streets. The streets are defined by the 90 degree corners, planes and tightness of the cubes and rectangles to the city plan. In this way the metaphor of the overall and each building design no mater where it’s location on the block; no matter when or in what sequence the metaphoric constraint appropriateness, zoning formulas, all lead the ideas to flow form one to another architect. Furthermore, the reader is able to “appreciate” the street, its geometry, limits and linearity as an idea on the conduit from the architect, through the metaphor and to the reader.

Likewise a visit to the Tyrol will immediately locate the conduit of design style as practically all chalets, houses and villas have identical roofs, walls, balconies, windows, flower boxes and doors. The conduit dominates and connectors builders, designers, contractors, suppliers and buyers.

That conduit is the dominant theme that unites all the villages. Interior decoration in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by wall to wall drapes, cornices, valences, upholstered furniture covered with slip covers, ketch and bric-a-brac figures and “charkas” known affectionately as “Bronx Renaissance”. The conduit that connected these outcomes were are system of city-wide gift stores, national gift market, central fabric suppliers and workshops and the heroic drapery hangers (of which I was one) completed their work.
Conduit is the parte and design system from which choices in structure, finishes, colors, textures, etc. follow. A really good design and good designer can produce a set of documents and its detail follows easily as a development of the logic found in the whole.

1.3 In Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad’ writes: 1.3.1 “It’s a strange thought, that culture is a product of man-made, unnatural things, that instead of culture shaping the architecture, it is the architecture (the environment) that shapes the culture. I would guess it makes sense after some x amount of years….maybe its in cycles: At first, culture creates the architecture, x years pass by, and then the architecture-environment modifies the culture. Then new modified culture creates new architecture, etc.
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn’t we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?”
The affect of the metaphor on other metaphors with all its links and consequences is manifest in the conduit which leads to one after the other and a continuation of the first.

1.4 The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff
About novel images and image metaphors he quotes 1.4.1 Andre Breton’s “My wife……whose waist is an hourglass” he says …..”By mapping the structure of one domain onto the structure of another”, “This is a superimposition of the image of an hour glass onto the image of a woman’s waist by virtue of their common shape. As before the metaphor is conceptual; it is not the works themselves, but the metal images. Here, we have the mental image of an hour glass and of a woman and we map the middle of the hourglass into the waist of the woman. The words are prompts for us to map from one conventional image to another”. Lakoff concludes that “ all metaphors are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” Likewise when we look at the geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those common elements where fit, coupling and joints occur. We remember that which exemplified the analogous match.
This observation of the metaphor finds that the commonality, commonplace and similarity are the chief focus of the metaphor. As Frank Lloyd Wright designed his Prairie architecture with Dominant horizontal axis thrust to his structure as common to the horizontal axis of the land upon which the building sits. Thus the two horizontal axes, the land and then the building were wed by their commonality of horizontality. In a city of sky scrapers architects parallel their new shafts with those adjacent to with space between to form the architectonic of verticality, canyons and shafts where the commonalty of all the vertical shafts bind them together. The red tile roofs of the Italian Riviera, California’s Mission Architecture are other such examples of commonalities, commonalities which are synonymous with their identity and expected class.

We note the 90 degree angles and shape that slide into one another. We note the way like metals, clips and angles fit; the way ceiling ducts are made to fit between structures and hung ceiling, etc. While it is less possible to spontaneously imagine the way we could relate the human form to a building when we circulate through its halls, rooms and closets its accommodation to our needs and necessities; to our self preservation and the maintenance of the building become apparent. We can map the building structure to ours by finding the one commonality amongst all the others. Very often we will hear someone say this place is” me”. The common image has been located and the fit made.

Describing generic specific structure he notes that they are under the Invariance Principle and concludes that the way to arrive at generic-level schemes for some knowledge structure is to extract its image its image-schematic structure. This is called the Generic is Specific Structure. He adds that it is an extremely common mechanism for comprehending the general from the specific. So what you can deduce for part you can assume is true of the whole.

So if the facade of building is in one order of architecture, vernacular, and building system you can presume the other parts are in a like arrangement and that the whole is of the classic order including its plan, section and details. What are involved here are mapping, channeling and one idea from one level to another.

1.4.2 According to Lakoff plausible accounts rather than scientific results is why we have conventional metaphors and why conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mappings than another. An architectural work establishes its own vocabulary which once comprehended become the way in which we experience the work, finding its discrepancies and fits and seeking the first and all the other similar elements. We do judge the work as to have Consistency, integrity and aesthetics. Buildings which do not have these characteristics do not work as metaphors.

The relevance of studying architecture as the making of metaphors is to provide practitioners, owners, and mainly those that shape the built environment that they have a somber and serious responsibility to fill our world with meaning and significance, That what they do matters as in this first of Layoff’s results (Please note the application of Layoff’s vocabulary, definitions and descriptions related to linguistics metaphorically applied to architecture): Summary of results:

1. 1.4.3 Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning. For example, as this is so for linguistics(spoken or written), then I infer that it must be true for non linguistics ,and I give as evidence the built habitats and their architectural antecedents, being as how what is built is first thought and conceived separately from building as thinking and conceiving is separate from the outward expression . Whether it is one or thousands public cultures is influenced, bound and authenticated by its’ metaphors. Not withstanding “idolatry” the metaphors are the contexts of life’s dramas and as our physical bodies are read by our neighbors finding evidence for inferences about social, political and philosophical claims about our culture and its place in the universe.
One of many warrants is recognizing, and operating the front door of a castle as we would the front door of our apartment; another warrant is the adaptive uses of obsolete buildings to new uses as a factory to multi- family residential uses, etc. We see the common space and structure and reason the building codes written to protect the health , safety and welfare of the general; public can be applied and the found to be re-zoned to fit the new uses in the fabric of the mixed-use zoned area; “comprehend abstract concepts (building codes, design layouts, and building codes) and perform abstract reasoning”. (Design and planning).
2. 1.4.4 Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor. Even an anonymous Florentine back ally’s brick wall, carved door, wall fountain, shuttered windows, building height, coloration of the fresco.

3. 1.4.5 Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.
After many years living in Saudi Arabia and Europe and away from Brooklyn I visited Park Slope. I saw the stoops ascending to their second floors, the carved wood and glass doors, the iron grilles, the four story walls, the cementous surrounded and conventionally pained widows but what I saw was only what I described.
I did not recognize what it was; it was all unfamiliar like a cardboard stage setting. I did not have a link to their context nor the scenarios of usage and the complex culture they represented. I neither owned nor personalized what I was seeing. All of this came to me without language but a feeling of anomie for what I was seeing and me in their presence, years later I enthusiastically escorted my Saudi colleagues thorough Washington, DC’s Georgetown showing them the immaculately maintained townhouses. I was full of joy, perceptually excited but my colleagues laughed and were totally disinterested. These were not their metaphors and they could hardly wait to leave the area to find a good Persian restaurant to have dinner. They, like my self years before did not see what I saw and more relevantly did not “get-the-concept”. Both of the above anti-metaphor cases were conceptualized without words as would be positive cases of metaphor.

4. 1.4.6 Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor.
As language is to speech so are buildings to architecture where each has a content and inner meaning of the hole as well as each of its parts. As each word, each attachment, plain, material, structure had first been conceived to achieve some purpose and fill some need. Hidden from the reader is the inner psychology, social background, etc of the man when speaking and the programming deign and contacting process from the reader of a building metaphor. As in completing an argument the reader perceives the inferences with its warrants and connects the evidence of the seen to the claims to make the resolution of the whole, all of which are surmised from the surface.
5. 1.4.7 through much of our conceptual system is metaphorical; a significant part of it is non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical understanding.
The science of the strength of materials, mathematics, structures, indeterminate beams, truss design, mechanical systems, electricity, lighting, etc. are each understood metaphorically and there precepts applied metaphorically but often random selections, trails and feasibility are random and rather in search of the metaphor with out knowing it is or not a metro and fit to be part of the metaphor at hand. On the other hand we may select on or another based on non-metaphorical, empirical test and descriptions of r properties. We then try to understand the metaphor in the selection, its commonality, how it contributes to the new application, how its has properties within itself which are alone strange and unrelated yet when couple with the whole or part of the created metaphor contribute to metaphor.
From example in the last 20 years store front’s tempered glass has been enhanced, thickened, strengthen and is now used in large quantizes as frameless curtain walls on private and massive public properties. A non-metaphorical building product with one used in one context has been taken out of a non-metaphorical understanding of properties and use to apply to another. Our primary experiences grounded in the laws of physics of gravity , plasticity, liquids, winds, sunlight, etc all contribute to our metaphorical understanding often the conceptual commonality accepting the strange .
In Belize, faced with a an unskilled workforce and the government wanting fancy houses for its government staff I choose a plethora of pre-engineered building components form non architectural catalogs as gigantic drainage pipes , sawn in half and used for roofs and in Tennessee relocated the country look of indignities building with US Plywood’s “texture 1-11″.

6. 1.4.8 Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete or at least more highly structured subject matter.
Owner occupied specialized works of architectural metaphors may begin with long periods of research, observations, and analysis ; conclusions and redesign and re-thinking of existing or utility of new systems; setting our system feasibility, pricing and meeting budgets, palling and programming, diagramming and design of sub systems and systems but when complete the metaphor is accessible, usable and compatible.
The whole of the metaphor is designed in such a way as to clarify, orient and provide “concrete” reification of all the design parameters into a “highly structured’ work, a work which homogenizes all these diverse and disjointed systems and operations into a well working machine. Building types such as pharmaceutical, petrochemical laboratories, data research centers, hospitals, space science centers, prisons, etc are such relatively abstract unstructured uses which only careful assembly can order. Faced with both housing and creating identify the Greeks and the Romans derived an Order of Architecture which we now call the Classical order of Architecture.
A classical order (of which Egypt was the first) is one of the ancient styles of building design in the classical tradition, distinguished by their proportions and their characteristic profiles and details, but most quickly recognizable by the type of column and capital employed. Each style also has its proper entablature, consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice. From the sixteenth century onwards, theorists recognized five orders.
From its inception design professionals will look outside of their field and the field of the proposed project to find organism, technologies provides a conceptual handle as the inner working of microchips, mainframes, submarines, rockets and jet propulsion, circus, markets, battleships and air-craft carriers, etc.
Long before the use of computers after faced with a complex way of teams of service clerks communicating on the phone, accessing and sharing files and instantly recording all transactions I invented a huge a round table where all clerks would be facing the center where would be sitting a kind of “Lazy Susan” . I choose the Lazy Suzan because of my experience in Chinese restaurants and selling Lazy Suzan’s as a young sales assistant in a gift store in the Bronx. As a result of the overall design of which this was one part the company’s business increased and prospered.
One of the executive vice presidents befriended me and late went on to head the New York Stock Exchange. The installation was a success and was used until the company closed its doors many years later.

The below italics are by Lakoff.
Layoff’s observations emphasize the instinctive, impulsive and intuitive nature of the architect’s metaphor that takes place in its creation and use.
1.4.9 Like the onomatopeics metaphors Lakoff’s mappings of conceptions override the overt spoken and descriptive and rely much more on Mnemonics (something intended to assist the memory, as a verse or formula) .However, for Lakoff the assistance comes from something much more primordial (constituting a beginning; giving origin to something derived or developed; original; elementary: primordial forms of life) to the person’s or societies experiences.
These become the matrix (encyclopedic) of schemas (in argument; the warrants {where a warrant is a license to make an inference and as such must have reader’s agreement} supporting the inferences (mappings) where in the metaphor becomes real). In this way the reader maps, learns and personalizes the strange into the realm of the familiar. The reader does so by the myriad of synaptic connections he is able to apply to that source. Hence architects translate their architectural conception from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two dimensional scaled drawings and then to real life full scale multi dimensions convention consisting of conventional materials, building elements (doors, windows, stairs, etc).
As maps are the result of cartographers rendering existing into a graphics for reading so is mapping to the reading of metaphors where the reader renders understanding from one source to another. Doing so mentally and producing a rendition of understanding (as a pen and ink of a figure) not as a graphic but a conceptual understanding.
Reader sees in a critical way the existing culling through and encyclopedia of referents to make the true relationship; the mapping which best renders the reality; the relationship which informs and clarifies as the map the location, configuration and characteristic of the reality. As the cartographer seeks lines, symbols and shadings to articulate the reality so the reader choices of heretofore unrelated and seemingly unrelated are found to have and essence common to both the reality and the rendition so that the metaphor can be repeated becoming the readers new vocabulary .
In fact architects do the opposite as graphic renditions are made of synapses between amorphic and seemingly desperate information. Yet the process of mapping is no less intense as architect review the matrix of conditions, operation , ideal and goals of the thesis to find similarities and differences , commonalities, and potential for one to resonate with another to make a “resolution” on the experience of a cognitive mapping which becomes the metaphor, parte and overwhelming new reality. The new reality is the target of the source and finally can be read. In the case of the birth of an infant metaphor readers may find a wide variety of source information which is germane to their own experience.
Before the public ever sees the constructed metaphor Building Officials, manufactures, city planners, owners, estimators, general contactors, specialty contractors, environmentalist, neighbors and community organization frost read the drawings and map their observations to their issues to form a slanted version of the reality.
Their mappings are based on the warrants which are their licensed to perform. Each warrant will support a different mapping (inference) and result in its own metaphor. In effect each will see a kind of reality of the proposed in the perspective of their peculiar warrant, where license is permission from authority to do something. It is assumed if one gets permission it has met the conditions, operations, ideal and goals of the proposed metaphor. Mapping is critical at this read to assure that the architect’s rendering of the program is faithful to the cognitive, lawful, physical and legal realities. It s like a map which gets tested by scientist, navigators , pilots and engineers before they build a craft to use the map, or set out on a journey using the map. Before the contracts start committing men and material the metaphor must map and be the metaphor meeting all expectations.
Before building, the suppliers, contractors and specialist make “shop drawings” to map the metaphor and present the graphic evidence that they can fill their claim to build for compensation. The architect’s team now gathers reviews and coordinates al of these warrants to assure their mappings do not interfere, nullify but additively contribute to the reifying of the source to the target and build the final product, on time, on budget and within the allowed schedule.
After opening the public users have the opportunity to map any and all the information that is superficially available form the shell, to its nuts and bolts. Many enjoy reading the project while it is being constructed to read the work and conceptualize the final form the bits and pieces they observe, mapping a single task to its final outcome and so forth. So the mapping of construction by onlookers, contactors is all part of the mapping process.
Like a landscape artist who gathers for the chaos of the nature into select5ed items to organize into the canvas so that the viewers will find what he saw and reconstruct so the architect and the user map their reality into a metaphor. In this way the conception of the map is the metaphor and what is made by the cartographer is a “graphic” to simplify the chaos to find the commonality. Sifting through the program the architect seeks the “commonality” between the reality and experience to make the metaphor. Mapping is only possible when we know the “commonplace”, the commonality, the characteristic common to both, the terms that both the source and the target have in common that the mapping takes place.
As the architect structures his program, design and specifications he simultaneously structures the metaphor of his work of architecture. Architecture consists of program specifics where the conditions, operations, goals and ideals are from heretofore unrelated and distant contexts but are themselves metaphors “mapped across conceptual domains”.
As the architectural program the mappings are asymmetric and partial. The only regular pattern is their irregularity, and, like a person can be read and understood, once one is familiar with the personality and character, vocabulary and references, and of course the context and situation of the work the work can also be read and understood. About Lakoff, In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. “prices are rising”). A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience.
The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.
This idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work 1.4.9 Metaphors We Live By. Other cognitive scientists study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the labels “analogy” and “conceptual blending.”
Lakoff continues:
7. / 1.4. 10 Each mapping (where mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from source domains and are not preexisting. To know a conceptual metaphor is to know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing. The same idea of mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical reasoning and inferences) is a fixed set of ontological (relating to essence or the nature of being) correspondences between entities in source domain and entities in target domain.
• 1.4.11 *LOVE IS A JOURNEY
• LIFE IS A JOURNEY
• SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS ARE PLANTS
• LOVE IS WAR
* 1.4.11 From Wikopedia on the www.
1.4.11 There is a list of over 100 schemas in many categories about basic human behavior, reactions and actions. These schemas are the realms in which the mappings takes place much the same as the inferences in arguments have warrants and link evidence to claims so do these schemas, architects carry-over their experiences with materials, physics, art, culture, building codes, structures, plasticity, etc. to form metaphor. Identifying conditions, operations, ideals and goals are combined to form plans, sections and elevations which are then translated in to contract documents. Later the contractors map this metaphor based on their schemes of cost, schedule and quality control into schedules and control documents. It is not until equipment, laborers and materials are brought to the side that the metaphor starts to form. Once formed the only evidence for the user (reader) are the thousands of cues from every angle, outside and inside to enable use and understanding.
The latter half of each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor is used.
Operationally, the work’s entrance is the first clue about the sequence of experiences of the metaphor taking us to the anticipated lobby, then reception followed by sequences of increasingly private (non-communal) and remote areas until reaching the terminal destination. The very size, context and location is couple with theme of parks, gated communities, skyscraper’s roof tops and cladding becoming a metaphor. The very outer edges of a metaphor portend of its most hidden content. Once we understand the metaphor and the mapping from the context to the form the mapping continues from entrance to the foyer and mapping from the context and cladding to every detail. We carry-over and map the metaphor as we delve deeper into its content and inner context always mapping the first to the current metaphor.
In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First, it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.
Therefore the metaphor of architecture is inherent not in the media of the building’s presence, parts or bits and pieces but in the mind of the reader and that the articulation of the metaphor as thinking and third that our use of the metaphor increases our know ledge of the metaphor and reading metaphors comes out of practice. The more we view paintings, ballets, symphonies, poetry, and architecture the better we become at their understanding and its metaphor further dwells in the reader while the building and its parts exist with out being understood. Extrapolating: the writer of the speech is as the architect and the speaker is as the reader of the metaphor where the metaphor can only be experienced to be understood.
Walk though an unlit city at night and feel the quite of the building’s voices because the readers have no visual information and with access to the closed buildings the metaphor is a potential with being a reality. Yet the potential for cognition does exist and is real but is not understood apart from its experience.
1.4.11 Humans interact with their environments based on their physical dimensions, capabilities and limits. The field of anthropometrics (human measurement) has unanswered questions, but it’s still true that human physical characteristics are fairly predictable and objectively measurable. Buildings scaled to human physical capabilities have steps, doorways, railings, work surfaces, seating, shelves, fixtures, walking distances, and other features that fit well to the average person.
1.4.11 Humans also interact with their environments based on their sensory capabilities. The fields of human perception systems, like perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology, are not exact sciences, because human information processing is not a purely physical act, and because perception is affected by cultural factors, personal preferences, experiences, and expectations, so human scale in architecture can also describe buildings with sightlines, acoustic properties, task lighting, ambient lighting, and spatial grammar that fit well with human senses. However, one important caveat is that human perceptions are always going to be less predictable and less measurable than physical dimensions.
1.4.11 Basically the scale of habitable metaphors is the intrinsic relation between the human figure and his surroundings as measured, proportioned and sensed. It is dramatically represented by Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (see below illustration) is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, representation of the human figure encircled by both a circumference encapsulating its’ feet to its outstretched fingertips where part is then encased in a square.

This scale is read in elevations, sections, plans, and whole and based realized in the limited and bound architectural space. These spaces and their variations of scale are where the reader perceives the architectural metaphors of compression, smallness, grandeur, pomposity, equipoise, balance, rest, dynamics, direction, static ness, etc. In his Glass House, Phillip Johnson extended that space to the surrounding nature, making the walls the grass and surrounding trees, St. Peter’s interiors is a Piranesi space. (The # # #Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione or ‘Imaginary Prisons’), is a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines.
1.4.11 Piranesi vision takes on a Kafkaesque and Escher-like distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthian structures, epic in volume, but empty of purpose. They are cappricci -whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin). Many of my pen and ink drawings were inspired by the Piranesi metaphor. In St. Peters the spaces are so real that they imply the potential for all mankind to occupy. The scale of the patterns on the floor are proportional to the height and widths enclosing the space they overwhelm the human figure as does the Baldachino whose height soars but is well below the dome covering the building.
The metaphor is instinctively perceived, mapped and sorted by mnemonic schemas as is New York’s Radio city Music Hall designed by my former employer Edward Durrell Stone and the entrance to the Louver by IM Pei. The surrounds of offices and shops by Michael Angelo feature window and door propositionally designed to man’s scale and perfectly mitigate the universal scale of the 1.4.11 Piazza did San Marco (St. Marks Plaza). Recalling the plazas of Italy Stone designed and I developed the State University of New York in Albany which featured metered arches, columns and pilasters on buildings to mitigate the various scales of both the large and small plazas.
My interview for the job where Bob Smith, his office manager, proudly entertained Mr. Stone and his board with an array of my portfolio covering all four walls of his executive conference room. The project gave me the opportunity to plan, design and details many plazas, monumental and convenience stairs as well as the way they would be enclosed and encased to demark the plazas, plinths, terraces and porticos of the galleries and circulation areas. Like Radio City this project was a grand public works metaphor recalling the Parthenon, Rome, Venice and the many tiny urban villages I had visited including Lucca, Sienna, Florence, etc. My book on 72 European cities includes many pen and ink drawings of each city.
1.4.11 The below is where human scale in architecture is deliberately violated:
• 2.0 For monumental effect. Buildings, statues, and memorials are constructed in a scale larger than life as a social/cultural signal that the subject matter is also larger than life. An extreme example is the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, etc.
• 2.0 For aesthetic effect. Many architects, particularly in the Modernist movement, design buildings that prioritize structural purity and clarity of form over concessions to human scale. This became the dominant American architectural style for decades. Some notable examples among many are Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei’s work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
• 2.0 To serve automotive scale. Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible from roadways assume a radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish about 3 objects or features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a 100-foot (30-meter) length of department store can perceive about 68 features; a driver passing the same frontage at 30 mph (13 m/s or 44 ft/s) can perceive about six or seven features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and shallow, readable at a glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage with bigger letters and fewer words. This urban form is traceable back to the innovations of developer A. W. Ross along Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1920.
•
8. / 1.4.12 Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in every day experience and knowledge.
Mapping and making metaphors are synonymous. The person and not the work make the metaphor. Without the body and the experience of either the author or the reader nothing is being made. The thing does not have but the persons have the experiences. As language, craft, and skills are learned by exercise, repetition and every day application so are mappings. Mappings are not subject to individual judgment or preference: but as a result of making seeking and finding the commonality by practice. Architects learn to associate, create and produce by years of education and practice while users have a longer history approaching and mapping for use and recognition. Yet new metaphors are difficult to assimilate without daily use and familiarity.
Often the owners of new building will provide its regular occupants with orientation, preliminary field trips and guided tours. Many buildings restrict users’ access by receptionist, locked doors and restricted areas.
It is not hard to experience a built metaphor as it is an ordinary fixture on the landscape of our visual vocabulary. It has predictable, albeit peculiar and indigenous characteristics the generic nature of the cues are anticipated.

9. /1.4.13 A conceptual system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings which form a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system.
Over the year’s society, cultures, families and individuals experience and store a plethora of mapping routines which are part of our mapping vocabulary. As a potential user when encountering a new building type such as a hi-tech manufacturing center we call upon our highly structured subsystem to find conceptual systems which will work to navigate this particular event. Another example is as a westerner encountering a Saudi Arab home which divides the family from the public areas of the house as private. In the high tech building doors will not open and corridors divert visitors away form sensitive and secret areas. In the Arab home the visitor is kept in area meant only for non-family members and where the females may not be seen. There is a common conventional metaphorical mapping which uses a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system. There is a similarity and an ability to accept and the constraints. The metaphor or the work of architecture includes each and every nut and bolt, plane and volumes, space and fascia, vent and blower, beam and slab, each with there mappings parallel to operational sequences, flows representations, openings and enclosures so that they operate in tandem and compliment one another. The conventions come from the experiences of doors that open, elevators that work, stairs that are strong, floors that bear our weight, buildings that don’t topple, and basic experiences that prove verticality, horizontality, diagonals, weights of gravity, etc.

And finally Lakoff concludes the structure of metaphor claiming that:

10 / 1.4.14There are two types of mappings: conceptual mappings and image mappings; both obey the Invariance Principle. “A. Image metaphors are not exact “look-alikes”;
many sensory mechanisms are at work, which can be characterized by Langacker’s focal adjustment (selection, perspective, and abstraction); B. images and Image-schemas are continuous; an image can be abstracted/schematized to various degrees; and C. image metaphors and conceptual metaphors are continuous; conceptual metaphorical mapping preserves image-schematic structure (Lakoff 1990) and image metaphors often involve conceptual aspects of the source image. (“All metaphors are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:”
Likewise when we look at the geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those common elements where fitting, coupling and joints occur), again this simultaneity of ideas and image operating in tandem where we see and know an idea simultaneously; where the convention of the architectural space and the metaphor of the conception converge.
Image mappings in architecture finds schemes from a repertoire of superficial conventions except in a Japanese or Arab house where we are asked to sit on the floor or eat without knives and forks or find no room with identifiable modality of uses, or a palace with only show rooms where living is behind concealed walls. A hotel’s grand ballroom is both a room in a palace, a place for royalty, we must be one of them, yet a congregation of guests in black ties and gowns are contemporary and family celebrating a wedding. Incongruities merge in continuous and seamless recollections.
# 1.4.11 In cognitive linguistics, the invariance principle is a simple attempt to explain similarities and differences between how an idea is understood in “ordinary” usage, and how it is understood when used as a conceptual metaphor.
Kövecses (2002: 102) provides the following example based on the semantics of the English verb to give.
She gave him a book. (Source language)
Based on the metaphor CAUSATION IS TRANSFER we get:
(a) She gave him a kiss.
(b) She gave him a headache.
However, the metaphor does not work in exactly the same way in each case, as seen in:
(b’) She gave him a headache, and he still has it.
(a’) *She gave him a kiss, and he still has it.
1.4.11 The invariance principle offers the hypothesis that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that remain coherent in the target context. The components of meaning that remain coherent in the target context retain their “basic structure” in some sense, so this is a form of invariance.
Architecturally, users encounter a habitable metaphor with their experience engrafted in a particular mapping inherent in their catalog of mappings. This mapping has its own language , vocabulary say of the way doors, windows floors, stairs and rooms names work and the user brings this vocabulary into, the target metaphor, say a new office building. Of course there will be all sorts of incongruities, similarities and differences. However this principle points out that the office building vocabulary will retain its basic structure. This means that while the vocabulary the user brings to the target from the source will be unchanged still keeping the images of doors, windows, etc as they were in the residential the office will be unchanged and unaffected. For example when an architect designs a bank from his source in the size, décor and detail of medieval great hall the target of banking with all its vocabulary of teller windows, manager’s carols, customer’s areas, vaults, etc will not change into medieval ways of serving, storing and managing the business.
When I designed a precinct police station for Bedford Stuyvesant I brought the community, park and community services onto the street and public pedestrian sidewalks while housing the police offices, muster and patrol functions to the back and under the building. While the building metaphor is now a community service police station mapping components of meaning from the source language of user and community friendly, human scale, public access and service which remained in the target police station. The vocabulary of all the police functions remained coherent, perceived and understood and did not vary. The problem is particularly interesting when the metaphor of a shopping mall with commercial retail shops brings its language to a target context of a hotel with service support. The front and back of the hotel, the rooms and maintenance and the transience of guest will remain coherent, overlaid with malls covered, circulation and service area. The separated spaces will face the ambulatory and be separately accessible to visitors. Such a combination you can see art work in airport terminals being open shops and passenger circulation to a common metaphor. The airport is still an airport but an airport with a mall. The Munich subway and underground shopping center are another such examples. Underground subway language, structures, ventilation, circulation is sustained while being influenced but not overriding the source.
1.4.15 Of the eight aspects of metaphor Lakoff describes the two most applies to architecture which is:
Our system of conventional metaphor is “alive” in the same sense that our system of grammatical and phonological (distribution and patterning of speech sounds in a language and of the tacit rules governing pronunciation.) rules is alive; namely it is constantly in use, automatically, and below the level of consciousness and Our metaphor system is central to our understanding of experience and to the way we act on that understanding.
1.4.11 It seems that onomatopeics are metaphors and can be onomatopoeic (grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as “click”, “bunk”, “clang”, “buzz”, “bang”, or animal noises such as “oink”, “moo”, or “meow”) ? In this case an assemblage instead of a sound. As a non-linguistic it has impact beyond words and is still a metaphor.
Then a metaphor is much more than the sum of its parts and is beyond any of its constituent constructions, parts and systems,
its very existence a metaphor. In both his books on Emphatics and Surrogates Dr. Weiss amplified this theory.

1.4.11 Before his death at 101 years of age completed a book called “Emphatics,” about the use of language. Dr. Weiss worked in the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, which addresses questions about the ultimate composition of reality, including the relationship between the mind and matter. He was particularly interested in the way people related to each other through symbols, language, intonation, art and music. Emphatics, (2000), which considers how ordinary experience stands in some dynamic relationship with a second dimension, which provides focus, interruption, significance, or grounds for the first.
1.4.11 “Surrogates,” published by Indiana University Press. Weiss says that: “A surrogate is “a replacement that is used as a means for transmitting benefits from a context in which its’ user may not be a part”. Architecture’s metaphors bridge from the program, designs and contactors a shelter and trusted habitat. The user enters and occupies the habitat with him having formulated but not articulated any its characteristics. Yet it works. “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of two sides to a surrogate, the user side and the context side (from which the user is absent or unable to function). “ Each of us uses others to achieve a benefit for ourselves. “We have that ability”. “None of us is just a person, a lived body, or just an organism. We are all three and more. We are singulars who own and express ourselves in and through them. In my early twenties I diagramed a being as “”appetite”, “desire” and “mind”. I defined each and described there interrelationships and support of one another. Metaphor is one and all of these and our first experiences of sharing life with in to what are outside of us.
As Weiss describes our mother language and other primary things we too ascribe like relations with objects and even buildings assigning them the value from which we may benefit and which may support. As Weiss proclaims that we cannot separate these three from each other so that it follows that we may find it impossible to separate us from the external metaphors. Inferences that are not yet warranted can be real even before we have the evidence. Metaphors are accepted at face value and architecture is accepted at face value. Weiss:” It is surely desirable to make a good use of linguistic surrogates”. “A common language contains many usable surrogates with different ranges, all kept within the limited confines that an established convention prescribes”
It is amazing how that different people can understand one another and how we can read meaning and conduct transaction with non-human extents, hence architecture. Architecture is such a “third party” to our experience yet understandable and in any context. In his search for what is real Weiss says he has explored the large and the small and the relationships that realities have to one another. Accustomed to surrogates architecture is made by assuming these connections are real and have benefit. Until they are built and used we trust that they will benefit the end user.
Assembling the ambulatory we assume the occupancy, frequency and destinations. We each are surrogates to one another yet fitted into one message. When this passage had been used as read as had been other passages, corridors and links. Like a linguistic the building stands, like a great, stone dagger, emphatic against the sky. The stair, the exit, the space calls, gives emphasis and is strongly expressive.
Despite their styles, periods, specific operations, conditions, operations and goals; despite their building types, country, national language, weather , climate, culture, etc. doors, openings, windows, stairs, elevators, floors, walls, roofs, ramps, landscaping, cladding, decoration, furniture, curtains, etc are all immediately understood and mapped from past to present , from other to present context and form individual to community of uses. A door in a private house is a door in a public concert hall. In fact its differences are naturally assimilated and unconsciously enjoyed.

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