Designing the Imagined City (or, why Frank Gehry isn’t a designer)

Robin asked me to upload the slides from my talk on Saturday, called “Designing the Imagined City“. The purpose of this talk was to invite the symposium participants to encounter the city phenomenologically, that is, through an attuned openness to seeing and thinking about how meaning is produced. This was accomplished, in part, through the use of images and literary texts.

What do such texts have to do with design? Plenty. For a start, there’s a well-known article by Thomas Erickson called “Design as Storytelling” , based upon Erickson’s interests in intersections between design and phenomenology. In a preface to the longer, more academic version of the paper, Erickson quotes philosopher David Seamon’s definition of phenomenological ecology (or, as it is now known, ecological phenomenology or ecophenomenology) as “an interdisciplinary field that explores and describes the ways that things, living forms, people, events, situations and worlds come together environmentally. A key focus is how all these entities belong together in place, why they might not belong, and how the might better belong through more sensitive understanding, design and policy-making.” (David Seamon, in “Dwelling, Seeing, Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology.” State University of New York Press, 1993)

As much as we may argue about what ‘design’ means, it’s possible to agree that design is about process. And inherent in any process is the story of that process. We narrate our designs, just as we narrate our lives and the entities and ideas we encounter throughout them. But for design to have life, it must be projected beyond the self. In a phenomenology of design, design has (at least) two elements: building and telling. Building, in the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger’s view, means to set something free into its own essence. Telling, phenomenologically speaking, involves an attuned listening and an openness to the being of others. As such, design as telling is not an assertion or claiming but a channelling. In this sense, a designer is a conduit, one who bears witness to something outside the self.

This is one reason why, in my talk, I said that I don’t consider Frank Gehry a designer, nor Bruce Mau, nor Frank Lloyd Wright, nor any of the known and unknown individuals who plan many of the physical structures and objects, or even the ideas we encounter. I commented that our habit of describing a particular building as “a Gehry” or “a Wright”, while offering a narrow definitional utility, signifies an important failure to acknowledge the ways buildings exist as narratives whose meanings take shape long after their makers have vanished. In my view, the most important thing about any ‘design’ is what happens after it is set free. Accordingly, I do not take much stock in the megalomania of personal legacy-building (“I did this”, “I made this”). I see such claims as evidence of a kind of cringing fearfulness in the face of the expanding universe, a universe that continues to expand long after we have burst into it like flowers of light and dark matter. While it is true that archaeologies of meaning will acknowledge those who formalize designs, such archaeologies extend well below and far beyond them in all directions.

If we look at iconic structures and places in Toronto — such as the CN Tower, the Bloor Street Viaduct, or Kensington Market — we can see how places transcend and even resist their designs. By looking at how such places are represented in the city’s literature, we can catch a glimpse of their mdeeper and more enduring meanings.

The longer text of my talk emerges from essays I have written for Reading Toronto, Spacing magazine, the new anthology The State of the Arts: Culture in Toronto (about to be released by Coach House Books) and elsewhere, including in a manuscript in progress called Imagining Toronto. In the meantime, please feel free to read those pieces in nascent form and/or the slides of my talk through the following links.

“Toronto’s Tower of Babel” (posted to Reading Toronto on 11 March 2006)

“The City’s Literary Cartographies” (posted to Reading Toronto on 16 March 2006)

“Textures of Kensington Market” (posted to Reading Toronto on 15 March 2006)

Designing the Imagined City (slides from Juice / Think Tank at OCAD, 14 October 2006)

The Imagining Toronto manuscript

If you have questions or comments, please record them here or feel free to e-mail me at alharris@yorku.ca .

Amy Lavender Harris | Imagining Toronto