“the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” *

When I read this quote I think “Ah, this describes what designers do! This is a description of design thinking, This is an important facet of a designerly way of looking at the world, this is a tenet of architectural intelligence” The only thing that is defined from the outset of an architectural project is a site, a program, a budget and a client – this is the case from which the architect has to abstract the arguments for his/her actions. One can draw parallels from this description to how Donald Schön explains how the practitioner deals with a situation; the architect has to construct an argument, the design of architectural form, which takes advantage of a set of perceived and carefully selected features found in the situation, things that are there from the outset.

* – The quote above doesn’t come from a design researcher, it Aristotle’s who describes the art of rhetoric 350 BC. According to Aristotle the rhetoric faculty consists of sharp observation of a situation and perceiving what can be useful in constructing an argument, and the invention of the argument itself, in what way to deliver it, communicate it. To this date his Ars Rhetorica is the authoritive work on rhetoric. Rhetorica consists of ethos, phatos and logos.

(1) the speaker’s power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible (ethos );
(2) his power of stirring the emotions of his hearers (pathos );
(3) his power of proving a truth, or an apparent truth, by means of persuasive arguments (logos )

! – Note that the goal of rhetoric is persuasion, not truth, when the audience is convinced the rhetoric has reached is goal. Rhetoric itself is morally neutral and can be wielded by good as well as evil.

Since architecture cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’ but more or less persuasive, rhetorical reasoning is akin to reasoning in architecture.
There are two basic kinds of argument one can make in Rhetoric, I would like to illustrate with an architectural example. One is the ‘Enthymeme’ which is the rhetorical version of deduction. The other the argument by `Example’ which is the rhetorical version of induction. The example has two varieties “one consisting on the mention of actual facts, the other in the invention of facts by the speaker” All examples consist of drawing analogies between real or invented situations and the situation in the point one wants to make. “all you require is the power of thinking out your analogy, a power developed by intellectual training”

The Hokusai Wave / The Example

An architectural illustration of the example, the rhetorical induction, would be Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s tale of the Hokusai Wave, which occurred to him when working on the Yokohama International Port Terminal.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great wave at Kanagawa (from a series of thirty-six views of Mount Fuji)

Yokohama International Port Terminal designed by Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s office FOA

“It started, actually, ten years ago in one of those episodes that radically change one’s perception of reality. Faced with a full press conference in the Yokohama City Hall, circa February 1995, we had to explain what it was we were trying to do in our newly awarded Yokohama Competition project. Faithful to our doctrine, fine tuned through years of academic practice, we proceeded to explain the circulation diagrams, the geometric transformations, and the con- struction technologies that were involved in the project, hoping that the audience would have enough patience to wait for the emergence of the project. Halfway through the presentation, we started to notice the blank expression of the public in the room – a clear indicator that the message was not coming across (this was to become a very common experience during our evolutionldots). After a few minutes of cold sweat, an image that was carefully edited from the project’s discourse but still floating somewhere in the back of our minds came suddenly to our rescue. It was the Hokusai Wave, a drawing from a local painter that we had been toying with while we indulged in geometric manipulations and construction hypotheses during the design phase of the competition entry. In a sudden – and risky – burst of inspiration, we terminated the factual process narrative to conclude that what really inspired us was the image of Hokusai’s Wave (see Figure ref{hokusai} ed.). The room exploded in an exclamation of sincere relief: `Aaaahhhldots!’ and we left the room, still sweating and grateful for that moment of lucidity, and with the clear realization that something wasn’t quite working in our carefully crafted discourse.”
- Zaera-Polo, Volume #3, 2005

When Zaera-Polo explains that the design ‘is like’ the Hokusai Wave he strikes a chord with his audience. The example allows his audience to suddenly read the design in a for them familiar context. Zeara-Polo discovers something that Aristotle already wrote about: “It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences — makes them, as the poets tell us, `charm the crowd’s ears more finely.’ Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.” Beside the persuasive use of the Hokusai Wave, the example was not completely invented, as they ‘had been toying with it while they indulged in geometric manipulations and construction hypotheses during the design phase’ so it was also part of the design process itself (well for the sake of the argument let’s take Zaera-Polo’s word for it).

After the discovery of the `Hokusai Wave principle’ as useful in more ways than just `toying’ with it in the design process, Zaera-Polo explains that they more consciously started to work with this phenomena, which he later calls ‘form with a double agenda’:

“Paradoxically, this strategy, originally devised to respond to commercial demands, became the foundation of a series of commissions for local authorities, most of them in Spain. Short-circuiting our conventional arsenal of diagrams and constructive solutions with locally resonant iconographies became a very effective technique to territorialize our constructed foreignness and connect with local agents. Local iconographies became a perfect excuse to naturalize materials and geometries that would have been otherwise vulnerable to budget cuts or political uncertainty. Moreover, iconography helped us accelerate the identification of traits from our usually hypertrophied site and program analysis in order to provide a formal argument for the projects. Iconographies did not precede the material investigation but rather emerged as viable figures from our immersion in each project’s analysis. We would collect general material about local customs and iconographies and keep that information on the table while we did site analysis and programmatic diagrams. We knew that a project was structured when a formal correlation started resonating between them.”
- Zaera-Polo, Volume #3, 2005

I would read ‘Short-circuiting our conventional arsenal of diagrams and constructive solutions with locally resonant iconographies became a very effective technique to territorialize our constructed foreignness and connect with local agents’ as an academic way of saying ‘ We discovered that integrating local images is a successful rhetorical move in persuading the local public’.

Seattle Central Library / The Enthymeme

The Enthymeme is as Aristotle calls it, a rhetorical syllogism. A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two others (the premises), the syllogism lies at the core of deductive reasoning. The rhetorical syllogism known as: “The enthymeme must consist of few propositions, fewer often than those which make up the normal syllogism. For if any of these propositions is a familiar fact, there is no need even to mention it; the hearer adds it himself.”(Aristotle) Deductive reasoning in rhetoric is a performative form of reasoning, aimed at effect, and tailored to an audience. An architect will explain his project differently in a pitch to a client than he will to his peers on a conference. Depending on the audience one can leave out steps and propositions in the line of argument, since the concern is if the point gets made with a specific audience. The facts that are at the architects’ disposal are the site, the briefing and an assessment of the complete situation (politically, economically, etc) in which his design endeavour has to take place. To these external facts he adds propositions of his own and constructs arguments, why his design should be one way or the other. The propositions used to make an enthymeme, have a special character, for they are not necessarily true, but they are generally true, commonplace or accepted truths for a specific audience. These kinds of propositions are ‘Maxims’. “It is a statement; not a particular fact, (…) but of a general kind; nor is it about any and every subject.”

As an example:

There is no man in all things prosperous,

and

There is no man among us all is free,

are maxims; but the latter, taken with what follows it, is an Enthymeme

For all are slaves of money or of chance

(Aristotle)

An architectural illustration of the enthymeme is beautifully given by Joshua Prince-Ramus in a lecture in 2006 at TED. Joshua Prince-Ramus worked as the U.S partner of O.M.A on the Seattle Central Library (and now has his own firm, REX). What follows is an edited transcription from the lecture where he lays down the argument for the design of the Seattle Central Library (SCL).

Joshua Prince-Ramus:

“I’m gonna build up the SCL before your eyes in five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you’ll see.”

source: (OMA,1999)

“Books have to share attention with other media of potent performance and attraction”

“This diagram was our position piece about the book, and our position was: ‘books are technology’, that is something people forget. It’s a form of technology that will have to share it’s dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media.”

source: (OMA,1999)

“The Library has been transformed from a space to read into a social center with multiple responsibilities”

“The second premise, and this was something that was very difficult of convincing the librarians of at first, that libraries since the inception of the Carnegie library tradition in America, have a second responsibility and that is for social roles. Something about which the librarians at first said: `this isn’t our mandate, our mandate is media and particularly the book’.”

From this transcription we can take the first maxim that: Books are a form of technology that will have to share it’s dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media.

The second maxim is that: Libraries have the responsibility to take on social roles.

“Flexibility in recent libraries – San Francisco, Denver, Phoenix – has been conceived as the creation of floors on which almost any library activity can happen. Programs are not separated, rooms or individual spaces not given unique character. In practice, it means that the bookshelves define generous reading areas at the opening, then expand inexorably to encroach on public space. Ultimately, in this form of flexibility, the Library strangles its own attractions.”

source: (OMA,1999)

“A more plausible strategy divides the building into spatial compartments dedicated to and equipped for specific duties. Flexibility can exist within each section, but not at the expense of any of the other compartments… Change is possible by deliberately redefining use, rededicating compartments to new programs. (Cf. the LA Library, where the main reading room was successfully transformed into a children’ s library.)”

source: (OMA,1999)

The diagrams demonstrating the ‘high-modernist flexibitlity’ vs. ‘compartmentalised flexibility’ argument (a refutative enthymeme supported by examples)

“The upper diagram is what we’ve seen in whole host of contemporary libraries that used high-modernist flexibility, so any activity could happen anywhere. The high modernist would say: ‘we don’t know the future of the library, we don’t know the future of the book, so we’ll use this approach,’ and what we saw were building that were very generic, and worse not only did the reading room look like the copy room, look like the magazine area. It meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf any other activity happening in it, and what was getting engulfed by the expansion of the book, were these social responsibilities.”

“So we propose what is at the lower diagram, a `very dumb’ approach, simply compartmentalise. Put those things what evolution we could predict -and I don’t mean that we’ll say what will actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of what would happen in the future- put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things we can’t predict on their roof tops. So that was the core idea.”

What happens here is that two lines of argument are contrasted to make one stand out as the right proposition or solution. This is what Aristotle calls a refutative enthymeme which is formed by the conjunction of two incompatible propositions. What is done here is that the proposed solution, `compartmentalized flexibility’ stands out as in favor of protecting ‘the responsibilities for social roles for the library’ in contrast with the high-modernist proposition.

But the librarians weren’t convinced yet in the first place, that these `social roles’ were part of their mandate.

Joshua Prince-Ramus continues:

source: (OMA,1999)
The first step (left) the redigestion of the program showing that a third of the program is for books (the blue area). The second step (right): “combining like with like, we have identified five platforms”

“Now we had to convince the library, that social roles were equally important to media in order to get them to accept this. What you’re seeing here is actually their program on the left, that is as it was given to us in all its clarity and glory (see left in figure ed.). Our first operation was to re-digest it and show it to them and say: ‘we haven’t touched it, but only one third of your own program is dedicated to media and books, two-thirds of it is already dedicated -that is the white band below- that what you said isn’t important, is already dedicated to social functions (see second bar from the left in figure ref{bars} ed.). Once we had presented that back to them they agreed that this core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles, the third diagram, that re-combined everything. (see thrid bar from the left in figure ed.) Then we started making new decisions, what you see is the design of the library (see on far right in figure ed.), specifically in the terms of square-footage, on the right of that diagram, you’ll see a series of five platforms, combed collective programs, and on the right the more indeterminate spaces, things like reading rooms, who’s evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can’t predict. So that literally was the design of the building. We came back a week later and presented them this.”

source: (OMA,1999)
One of the proposal models of SCL

source: (OMA,1999)
Schematic section indicating programmatic entities as a ‘figure-ground reversal’

This is the general argument for the overall scheme. Prince-Ramus continues to explain more about why other manipulations in the form, the facade, floorplans, etc. have been done, but I won’t dwell on that further. The architectural illustration of the enthymeme in this case is more that sufficient.

Both in Zaera-Polo and Prince-Ramus’ case they are involved in a public presentation, they have to explain to an audience or they are negotiating with their clients. While in their respective stories the arguments are clear, we have to be careful in seeing these stories as direct representations of the design process. What we can say is that they both are consciously working towards making the rhetorical argument for their design proposals as strong as possible and as Zaera-Polo explains well in his piece, the consciousness of these rhetoric effects start to have their repercussions on the design process itself, so working towards a rhetorically strong design that performs well in front of different audiences. Prince-Ramus talks about “A hyper-rational process. It’s a process that takes rationality to almost an absurd level, it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people sort of would call a rational conclusion to something. It concludes in something that you see here (shows a photograph of SCL ed.), that you wouldn’t normally expect as the result of rationality.” While the argument as Prince-Ramus unfolds it is clear, one can be very critical about the conclusion.

The conclusion could still result in a building other than the one they proposed. That the combed program diagram literally translates into the boxes with program on their rooftops seems obvious, but this is very much dependent on the chosen modes of representation that are used with building up the argument.

If one had represented the program as a bubble diagram or a pie-chart would the building than be a huge bubble composition or a giant pie? And even if we stick with the combed bar diagram, why would one read it as section, and not as a plan, since the bar surface represents square footage floor surface, not volume or wall-surface. While rhetorically this works quite well, it is by no means a logical consequence of the premises Prince-Ramus states.

The crux in this situation is that there are images involved to represent ideas, propositions and objective data. This is where the magic happens as Prince-Ramus cleverly demonstrates. Because while a certain image maybe perfectly able to convey a point, the choice of a certain image also `secretly’ or implicitly determines the direction of the `argument’ towards a certain design scheme. The choice for a certain image to represent a certain idea or data isn’t based on a rational argument in the first place, how images are used is influenced by conventions, habits, cultural notions, but not by strict rules. Just like picking a certain way to represent something, that same representation is open to interpretation and manipulation, independently from the intentions of certain representation (if you could even speak of representations ‘having intentions of themselves’). These manipulations practically always remain below the radar and are unconsciously accepted as logical by the audience, this is why the use of manipulation and the use of images can be so powerful when used consciously and intelligently.

This arena, that of reasoning with images, is where a specific architectural mode of reasoning comes into play. C.S.Pierce refers to this way of reasoning as diagrammatic reasoning. I’ll make a more elaborate post on this later, but to give a super short cut explanation; Pierce’s defines the diagram as an ‘image’ (he talks of an icon) on top of a system of representation. For example the written English language. Letters and words are images, these images can only be understood if you have internalized the system of representation of English, in other words the English syntax, grammar, etc. Having internalized a system of representation allows us to read words, maps, make calculations. For architects have internalized the systems of representation of reading plan, section, elevation, construction drawings. I can’t read Chinese, because I never internalized (i.e. learned) its system, but I can see the image, and read a character as the plan of a building. So while images and systems of representation belong to each other, these relations can be manipulated by the mind. This is a move often done by architects, they choose to read one image with the system of representation of another. This is also exactly what happens when the program bar diagram is manipulated and read as the section of Seattle Central Library building, it is an instance of finding something new through diagrammatic reasoning.

More on Pierce’s Diagrammatic Reasoning next time!