LITMIR.BIZ

      HAROLD AS FEEDBACK’S FOIL

      IMPROVISATIONAL COMEDY AND ARCHITECTURE

       Sarah Hirschman

Architects speak about the needs of users with program diagrams in project proposals, and sometimes they perform post-occupancy surveys, but most often the ideas that drive a conceptual design aren’t ever actually tested in a real way, nor do they benefit from feedback. We’re left with a disconnect between intention and results. In comedy, the test of efficacy is immediate and results are clear—if someone laughs at a joke, it’s a success. Looking closely at the way humour works, then, could potentially reveal clues about how architecture might incorporate feedback into its design process. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes that the joke is “a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once. Everything in jokes that is aimed at gaining pleasure is calculated with an eye toward the third person […] and this gives us a full impression of how indispensable this third person is for the completion of the joking process.”¹ The joke has two-way communication built into it; it is a call that demands a response to properly function. The joke is a social act as well as a creative one. Jokes invite responses, and while they might be quite different from those architects seek to induce, the way they operate as a deliberate exchange of information can teach us something about being consciously responsive in the design process.

Feedback generally refers to something exterior to the process of designing—the collection of data from clients or users. Not only does there lack a clear rubric for interpretation of this data, there’s no standard mandate to collect it. How do we weigh the reported experience of one constituency over another, and how do we confirm the conclusions others make? Who decides what data gets collected and how it gets used? This essay proposes a new model for understanding communication and collaboration in the design process following Keller Easterling’s observation: “Architects typically love manners, utopias and crises. We love to make difficult questions harder. We love to train [ourselves] to do labourintensive tasks,” and so “a better role for the architect is not that of an optimizer but that of a comedian.”² The architect’s comedy is increasingly conversational, especially as worksharing software like Autodesk Revit imposes a continual call-and-response within the office in its insatiable saving-to-central. Easterling’s “architect-as-comedian” operates just at the threshold of futility, dispensing with traditional “hierarchical, ‘atelier’ culture,” in favour of direct engagement with “larger cultural organizations that actually direct most of the space-making.”³ Improvisation has been present in one form or another within architecture since the middle of the last century; this essay considers a structured subset of improvisational comedy, what might be known as “Chicago-style improv,” for rigorous insight into intentional collaboration, and posit a way in which feedback can thrive within structure.

Though the basic tenets of improvisation—spontaneity, use of material at hand—remain relatively consistent, its implications and the way improvised works are received vary widely across creative fields and through time. Where the improvisation of abstract impressionist painters like Jackson Pollock might be said to access deep subconscious knowledge (an individualistic perspective) an alternate approach that became popular in the 1960s regarded improvisation instead as a kind of extreme form of collaboration. According to American Studies professor Daniel Belgrad, “this model privileged ensemble work, typically in performing arts like music and dance. In this kind of work, the artists’ creative ideas were understood to emerge not ‘from the depths’ of the unconscious mind, but from the group dynamic.”⁴ This emphasized group improvisation as a way to create new works rather than considering improvisation as akin to a revelatory psychoanalysis for an individual to explore.

Architecture has flirted with improvisation before. In architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace project (1964), users were invited to manipulate their environments and create hyper-customized and specific forms that suited their needs. The Fun Palace was, as architectural historian/theorist Stanley Mathews points out, “not really a building at all but a vast, socially interactive machine, an improvisational architecture, constantly changing in a ceaseless cycle of assembly and dismantling.”⁵ In Price’s project, the users were the improvisers, not the architect. He would provide a base set of materials or possibilities, but users were tasked with transforming them to make spaces work. Mathews contends that this version of improvisation tracks the social politics of the 1960s, a shift from a Modernist worldview of “unchanging ideality, abstract space and purity, to a Heraclitean view of a world in constant flux.”⁶ The architect might have some broad ideas about how to support growth or change, but the Fun Palace contends that only users know what suits their needs. Improvisation here means interactive, flexible, easily adjustable. If indeed the “programmatic fluidity and formal indeterminacy of the Fun Palace is an architectural analogue to the transformations experienced throughout postwar British society,” per Mathews, then perhaps there’s another version of consciously improvisational design similarly suited to our time.⁷

      Cedric Price, Fun palace, 1964. Model. Image courtesy of Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.