Dear Colleagues:I was delighted with the last issue of Connector because it felt like we were beginning to talk always the first step in getting to the heart of the matter.
It seems to me that formulating an answer to the question of what architects should know about structures needs to be the first order of businessþa discussion that could begin in these pages and continue into a conference as suggested by Prof. White. To contribute to this discussion, I put forth the following:
Imagine for a moment that a rope has been strung around the earth. The rope is just taut, just touching the surface. In this configuration, it has a length of approximately 24,000 miles. Now imagine cutting the rope and splicing in a six foot length, so that a new rope is formed that is six feet longer than the original. How far does the new rope move away from the earth's surface? Guess. Just use your intuition. Does it move a millionth of an inch, a thousandth of an inch, a hundredth of an inch, an inch, a foot, two feet? Before continuing, close your eyes and imagine the answer for yourself.If you are like most people with whom I have performed this thought experiment, your guess will lie somewhere between a millionth and a thousandth of an inch. The correct answer, however, is approximately one foot. Next, imagine a disk the size of a twenty-five cent piece. Once again a rope or string has been drawn just taut to the circumference and once again I would ask you to imagine splicing in a six foot length. Similarly, I would ask you to guess how far you think the new string will move away from its original position in touch with the edge of the disk. The answer is the same, about a foot.
As I splice the circumference of one circle onto another (a six foot length of rope corresponds to a circle with a diameter of about two feet), the new diameter will be the direct summation of the original ones. Therefore, if I splice a six foot length of rope into ANY circle, the resulting circle will be about two feet larger in diameter than it was originally.
The important lesson is this: There is a particular way of understanding circlesþa way that transcends the simple equation that relates circumference to diameter, but which is consistent with itþthat allows a person to visualize the act of spicing in a length of circumference and permits them to predict accurately the new diameter. The person can successfully formulate an answer in the twinkling of an eye without lengthy calculation. If we didn't know the "trick" ourselves, and if we observed someone performing this experiment and witnessed them coming up with the correct answer over and over again, we might say the person possessed an "intuitive" understanding of circles, one that somehow allows the person to "see" or to "feel" the correct answer without performing an analysis. Moreover, by intuition we would not mean some weak, blind feeling, but rather a highly developed sense that is right every time.
Intuition is a fundamental ingredient in the practice of architecture and is relied on over and over again in the act of designing. The building should be sited just so because...it feels right in this position. The pool should be placed in this location because...it seems like the right place for it. Some of the most important decisions that are made during the design of a building are made on the basis of intuition. Furthermore, only those intuitions that are readily available to the designer are included in this process. If a designer doesn't have an intuition about a particular option, they will either reject it outright or, more typically, never even consider it. In certain cases, they will defer to a specialist and grudgingly rely on the outside expert opinion.
Technical subjects, on the other hand, generally depart from the intuitive approach. You never hear an instructor say that a moment diagram will look like such and such because their intu- ition tells them so. They never say that a particular structural system will be the most appropriate solution because intuitively speaking it makes the most sense. On the contrary, intuition appears to be barred from entering the scientific realm of technical courses where numbers and calculations rule. One could quite correctly ask the ques- tion, "Why?" But more significantly, one could ask the question, "At what cost?" If the architectural design process depends heavily on a designer's first-hand intuition, and if the designer does not possess intuition about techni- cal matters, is it any great mystery why it is so difficult to meaningfully inte- grate technical concerns with architectural design? Therefore, it seems to me that first and foremost architects need to understand structures at the level of intuition, and that our job (undoubtedly extremely difficult) is to get them going in that direction.
Gary Black
Department of Architecture
232 Wurster Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
(510)642-7922.