This entry follows on from the excellent dialougue started by Monsieur Fincham, where he argued, amongst other things, that creating Architecture is an inherently intellectual activity and that Architects should be more aware of this.
I take something of a big-tent approach to design and architecture and prefer not to spend too much energy following the seams and fissures in language which are used to divide disciplines, and so I’m quite comfortable with the idea that design is an inherently intellectual activity.
I’d like to renew this discussion by exploring a specific aspect of these statements. I am personally rather ambivalent about the need for Architecture or Architects to realise the intellectual component of their disclipline as I find the concept of Intellectualism, or the Intellectual rather void of meaning until there is some content poured into the phrase. For my mind being intellectual is a means, not an ends, and is a rather neutral position until the ends are more explicitly explored. So I’ve become curious to understand what the purpose of intellectualism is?
Purpose is itself an interesting word which in this context is meant to suggest force and direction rather than a neat resolution. It asks what is the tractory of intent of Intellectualism? Where does it lead? I fear if we don’t ask these questions, and answer them honestly we risk becoming trapped by our own language, becoming imprisoned in our own textual constructions.
Although I am by no means an in-depth reader of his (merely an fortunate audience member), ‘cultural philosopher’ [a title used not by himself of course] Slavoj Zizek rather nobly justified his intellectual pursuits as such (I paraphrase, hopefully not too hopelessly):
‘we must stop, then think. We need to understand the world in order to act sensibly.’
This is appealing because it ties an inter-dependancy between thinking and doing, which is of course existentially fundamental, but it also of course prioritises thinking to occur first, thus resisting naive action.
Of course the final word ‘sensibly’ is a whopping debate in itself. And i’ve replaced ‘thinking’ with ‘intellectualism’ as a personal presumption that the former is a pre-reflective state of the latter.
Is the debate of trajectory and intent an existential one? For me it becomes very quickly a reflection on thinking/being/dwelling, as a momentous (but irregular) trajectory in itself. This is a Heideggerian idea i think..with a dash of the phenomenologists (who I tend to align myself with for strengthening this thinking-being thread) (Merleau-Ponty, Vesely).
I am honestly not sure if this tone or direction of thought is what you are after though Barnaby, because you are critical of the isolationist tendency of academia.
I’m not really after anything, it wouldn’t be an honest question if I thought I knew the answer. I would however like to think (perhaps hopefully) that there is a relatively straightforward answer to this question. Since the role of intellectualism has been raised as an important one for designers and architects, it only seems sensible to me that we should be able to define what this means. Otherwise we descend into conversations about words with no definition, which leads to nonsensc.