Gutman: Design, Form and Reparation

	Design, Form and Reparation Robert Gutman, Ph.D. June 17, 1997.
	This paper could not have appeared without the help and support of Larry Hirschhorn. His devotion and affection for me and my family in the time of our bereavement has been wonderful. Larry nursed this paper into being, through frequent phone calls, via email mesages, and finally through interviewing me by phone as if I were his client, which in a sense, I was. He should be regarded as joint author. Introduction Two experiences underlie my interest in the psychodynamics of the creative architect in architectural practice. One is a seminar I have taught for professional degree students in architecture on the subject of psychoanalysis and architecture. It has been interesting to me to see how young architects can learn to make use of psychoanalytic ideas in their studio work, and the ways in which it can assist them with the problems they encounter in the student role. The parts of the psychoanalytic tradition that appeal to them vary. Many of them are drawn to Jung because of the way in which they regard themselves as working through a relation between their secret self and the more public persona they present to the world. Also, among the great analysts, Jung was the only one to have designed a building. Others are moved by Freud, but less because of his ideas about the unconscious than for his specific discussions of art and the meaning of monuments. Melanie Klein they find difficult, until they discover the work of the British critic and painter, Adrian Stokes, whose brilliant comments on painting and architecture allow them to discover the relevance of the Kleinian tradition for understanding the relations between their own architectural production and their personal feelings. Many of them have found Winnicott's studies of children, play, creativity, and the holding environment ideas that can help them interpret space in new ways. Although we also deal with Lacan--what survey of psychoanalysis at this time can afford to overlook him---Lacan's work has not proven of much assistance in discussing architecture, but perhaps this reflects my bias as much as theirs. The other experience which has helped to inform the discussion that follows is my consulting work with architecture firms, professional associations, and client groups who hire the services of architects. In almost all these settings, I have noticed that the architects who conceive the fundamental form and outline of the building, and whose ideas therefore establish the protocol for the way in which the space of the final product is organized and the appearance it will have, occupy an almost heroic status in the profession. These people, men and to some degree now women as well, are known as "design" architects. They are the architects who are regarded as the authors of buildings, it is they whose special signature or style is discussed by the newspaper critics, and it is they who get interviewed by Charlie Rose. The design architects are the artists of the profession. They tend to act like prima donnas, and are treated in these terms by many audiences. Although the importance of the design architect (as distinguished from the architect who deals with construction or makes sure the building will function well) has a well established lineage in the profession, it has acquired a new prominence in the past thirty years. This prominence results partly from the tremendous growth of interest in visual culture and art generally, but it is also enhanced by new, sturdier, flexible building materials and advances in building technology which make it possible to construct seemingly bizarre, puzzling, but very intriguing building forms. These developments foster the reinforcement of the self-attitudes of design architects, and they raise the same sorts of questions about the personality of the design architect that critics sometimes ask about psychoanalysis itself: to what extent are the syndromes that therapists treat manifestations of contemporary cultural and social conditions? As is the case with other prima donnas, the attitude within the profession toward the design architect is characterized by a good deal of ambivalence. He is the cock of the walk, the heroic figure, the individual on whose identity the public seizes, and for these reasons often infuriates his more pragmatic colleagues who correctly argue that without their services buildings would not stand up. As with other artists, the design architect often has mixed feelings about himself, too. He recognizes the fragility of his achievement, how much it was won through some fierce battle with his inner self, and the ease with which the public's admiration fades quickly. This happens especially in this era where the audience for artistic production is continually searching for something new and different. In consulting to organizations and groups involved with architecture, questions arise frequently about the pressures which the special status of the designer generate in a realm where colleagueship is supposed to prevail. Or to put the issue in terms that encompass the interests of ISPSO and this conference: what difficulties do the psychodynamics of creativity viewed from the point of view of the individual artist, breed in an organization that deploys the creative product, the design for a building, as an organizational asset? The Psychodynamics of Creativity To understand this problem, it is important to examine the psychodynamics of creativity. Melanie Klein has emphasized how artistic work helps the artist repair her inner world. This artistic work resolves a conflict by enabling the artist to introject the wholeness of the work as an antidote to the fragmentation of his inner world. This is its healing aspect. However, it is also important to point out that the process of creation entails substantial destruction and significant risk and anxiety. The process of revision is itself a destructive process. It means that the artist tears down what he has lovingly created. The wish contained in the first draft is mercilessly critiqued. This process of creating, destroying, drawing, expunging---it goes on in all work---the literary as well as the visual arts. Manuscript versions of poet’s or novelist's work illustrate this process in abundance. There are very few artistic or creative people who do not revise their own work. For architects, as for most artists and creative people, this process of internal critique is preceded by the experience of being critiqued by a mentor or teacher. The artist gains the psychological resources to tear down his or her own work by internalizing the critical and sometimes humiliating voice of the teacher. Novice architects inherit so to speak an artistic super-ego as a pre-condition for their own effective artistry. Many artists are familiar with the experience of hating their early drafts, of finding them contemptible. In architecture schools where design considerations dominate the curriculum, students are exposed to a particularly harsh process of review of their work. This happens in studio classes where the student meets with the instructor one-on-one, and also, even more scathingly, in public reviews in which several critics focus collectively on the production of a single student. I have seen a similar process in architecture firms. A junior colleague or partner will present his or her design idea to the senior design partner. The senior designer then will take a piece of tracing paper and impose his design over the colleague's proposal--thus erasing it. The junior colleague is humiliated by this encounter but defers to it---because the person who is superimposing it is the great artist and also senior to him. You can see on the face of the person whose design has been effaced(the word itself is significant)---this mixture of admiration and hostility. Of course, the design architect, if he is worth his salt, constantly engages with the same process with his own work. The process of becoming a design architect is thus injurious and creates a special artistic persona, a character structure. Designers carry about them a certain conceit, and associated narcissism. There is the tale of the woman who calls up Frank Lloyd Wright- and says "Mr. Wright- your roof is leaking- and he says "What! you left it out in the rain?" The architectural tradition is replete with stories of this kind in which the heroic architect cares only about the esthetic and formal properties of his buildings. The designer’s conceit rests on the idea of their irresponsibility, on the assumption that since they are artists distinguished for their creative ability, they are freed of the obligation to consider other issues of building. The idea resembles the concept of "poetic license." The idea of irresponsibility is surely linked to the psychological violence architects have undergone in learning how to design, the harsh criticism that is a feature of studio education in architecture, along with the attacks they deploy against themselves in revising their own work. Because they are battle-scarred they deserve special treatment, so they often think. Their victimization confers privileges. This conceit is matched by what we might call a "thin-skin, thick-skinned," persona. For design architects to survive their own education they must become in some degree thick-skinned. Part of their thick skin are the rationalizations they develop that make their work appear logical, necessary, and correct. (Design architects are often able to provide an oral or written account of the logic of their work - why in fact all its parts truly hang together) But, of course, such accounts are rationalizations only. After all, an aesthetic solution is not something that is logically constructed---it is an imaginative leap---and this makes it fragile and vulnerable to attack. Thus the thick skin, which makes architects so often appear to colleagues or clients as people impervious to rational debate, is a defense against the thin skin. Another aspect of their thick skin, I think, is that they learn through the studio experience to take the offense as a way of quelling criticism before it comes. This creates a certain touchiness. I knew a gifted designer who was very insecure and behaved childishly. To protect himself he imagined that he was much more aggressive than he actually was capable of being. He reported often how he "told people off." "I wiped so and so off the floor," he would say. But the next day you would run into this "so and so." "I heard that X let you have it." The other person typically would say to me: "No, what do you mean, we had a nice conversation." The designer had the fantasy that he had wiped the guy off the floor. We might say that his acute insecurity prevented him from actually being aggressive and instead he created a fantasy of his aggressiveness to protect his self-esteem. I want to suggest that the design architect's thin skin is not only linked to the provisional nature of their aesthetic solution, to the fact as an imaginative product it can never be "proven." It is also linked to the fact that the design solution is so much tied up with the artistic vision as the solution to the inner conflict. The artist succeeds in transforming an inner conflict by using it as raw material to create something whole and fine and beautiful. But if the product should fail to be beautiful, what is exposed once again is the inner conflict in all its chaos. One is reminded here of the recent story of J Anthony Lukas, a brilliant journalist who won the Pulitzer prize for his study of the Boston busing crisis. He committed suicide shortly after finishing his most recent (and still unpublished) work because he found it a disappointment. We may be puzzled at this level of despair. But if we see the work of art as a temporary solution to an inner conflict, the failed art only brings to the surface the inner conflict once again. The demon returns despite al the heroic efforts undertaken to suppress it. We could say that the prospect, indeed the inevitability of failing, is itself a source of significant anxiety and sustained vigilance for the designer, just because of the close integration between the success of designs in winning an audience and the role of the design itself in the designer's personal psyche. Designers who lose their cachet seem to experience an unusually precipitous decline in their self-regard and their ability to maintain their confidence in competing with fellow architects. Architects who were once at the top of the heap but then lose their stature understandably find it hard to cope with their reduced position. heir new designs seem to have lost their force and vigor. They often try desperately to regain their hold by adopting a new style, a signature that is different from what they were best known for previously. But the strategy rarely succeeds, perhaps because it is too inauthentic, and its connection to the process of reparation too artificial. I want to draw the analogy here to the aging of a beautiful woman. I described the architect designer as being thin skinned-- because his aesthetic solutions are fragile. The beautiful women’s beauty is as we say "skin-deep," subject to the inevitable forces of biological decay. The inevitability of decline creates I suggest powerful anxieties, not simply because it augurs death but because it can and often reveals a hidden ugliness or deficiency of character. The Designer in Context Having described the artist designer in this way it is time to consider how the designer fits into the context of the architecture firm. What are the psychodynamics of creativity among a group of people rather than just within one person? Let me given an example of one dynamic. I was called up by the managing partner of a 20 person firm which is headed by an extremely gifted and successful young designer whose interior designs have garnered tremendous attention and praise within the architectural and fashion industries. We will call the managing partner Will and the designer George. Will had very mixed feelings toward George. He wanted George to give him an ownership share in the firm, but George was reluctant to do so. I met with the managing partner first by himself---he revealed to me all of his many disagreements with George and the hostility he felt toward him. Then George entered, dressed in a black cape, looking like a painter or poet of the Parisian demimonde of the last century. Will’s tone changed completely. He became extremely deferential as if he were kissing George’s feet. The whole matter of the managing partner's desire for ownership in the firm, which I was ostensibly called in to help facilitate, completely disappeared from the agenda. Will didn’t have the nerve. Sensing Will’s cowardice, George played his role as the artist/enfant terrible for all its worth. I thought to myself "Will will be out on his ear soon." George could only have contempt for him. I learned later that the managing partner spent his life in a secondary position to a succession of famous designers in different firms. He told me that "he wished he had their gift." Will is unable to liberate himself to engage in another kind of creative process---his desire to be a designer himself runs so deep that he is only able to function in architecture by associating himself as closely as he can with design architects. The profession is chock full of people like Will. Even though they occupy a support role, often a peripheral position in such firms, they still are able to think of themselves as closer to the core of the field than other managerial types who work in firms that are not distinguished for their design quality. Of course, from the point of view of the design firm, such architects are a welcome resource. Who is to say that these people are not better off positioned as they are, despite the personal humiliation and pain they often suffer? At least when they are asked where they work, they can point proudly to the renown of their firm within architectural circles. The artist as prima donna is an acknowledged figure in our culture, and of course, in the psychoanalytic tradition as well, where it is often linked to the idea of the narcissistic artist. Architecture borrows from this tradition just as do the other arts. Young architects will often endure considerable financial sacrifice to apprentice themselves to these canonical leaders, hoping that somehow the gifts of the master will be passed on to them. The psychological meaning of this process is interesting to contemplate. Do the young, for example, hope that they will acquire from the master a design resolution of their own inner conflicts which they can internalize? It may be something like this, because it is not uncommon for gifted younger architects to spend part of their careers working for a succession of great or good designers, hoping somehow to borrow from the knowledge and insight of all of them. The best of the younger generation don't last very long at any single firm. If they are very good themselves,, they can pick up what is valuable in the personality and language of the prima donna rather quickly. Also, if they are searching to develop their own original design vocabulary, it is useful to become familiar with the range of attitudes dominating the generation just before their own. Perhaps the most critical factor in their own development is the discovery that the great design architects of any period insist on running their own show, and don't like criticism. Or to put it in psychodynamic terms, a design language that will resolve one architect's inner conflicts works for that particular individual, and not for anyone else. I remember a conversation with Phillip Johnson several years ago in which I asked him whether he hired any Princeton students to work in his firm. "Hell no," he said. "All your students want to be designers. I do all the designs in our firm. I only hire students from schools which turn out production people who are content to do the bathroom details for my buildings. Any challenger to Johnson's authority obviously would have had to leave the firm, and if he were fated to become a significant designer in his own right, obviously should have.. But the firm responds in its own destructive ways to the designer. We are all familiar with the myth of Soliari and Mozart, the former so admired and envied the latter that, according to the film Amadeus, he was the cause of much of Mozart’s suffering and ultimate death. The designer stimulates the envy most of us feel for the talent of others. Their creative achievements violate our own self-esteem. It is as if the violence and pain stirred up in the creative process is then introjected by the bystander, who as much as he admires the work of beauty, feels diminished by it. (This is one reason we give critics such authority--their violent, passionate attack on the artists protects our self-esteem. Other architects, whose time has passed, or who lack the gift of the masters, often cherish the words of the harsh critic, and cite their commentaries over and over again in an effort to bolster their self-esteem. And in a manner that makes no sense except psychodynamically, they often praise the work of architects who are ignored by the critics. Consider the following case. A senior partner, we will call him Robert, is upset that his firm has not won any meaningful design awards. The firm is very successful, it has a good reputation for its capacity to address pragmatic building problems in several industries. One global company gives all its work to just three firms, this firm is one of the three, on a rotating basis. As the firm became more successful, Robert began to wonder if it was not time to achieve a certain renown in terms of design---where it really counted. In addition, a new factor entered from the point of view of clients. The GSA (Government Services Administration) - which now assumed responsibility for all government buildings, was introducing a new criterion in awarding contracts. They asked bidders to respond to the question: "Have you won any design awards?" That had never appeared before, and suddenly from a practical point of view in getting work, Robert and his partners worried that they would be excluded from the competition because they had not won any design awards of importance. The firm asked me to help them consider this issue. Before I started with them, Robert, with the lackluster concurrence of his partners, had gotten approval to hire two designers. They "scoured" the country, or so they told me, for two guys who were regarded as good designers, but amazingly, given the reason why the firm was hiring them, the two had not won awards before. When I viewed the work done under the direction of the new designers, and examined the material which they submitted to the design award juries, I concluded that the firm had not gone after really first rate talent. What were the dynamics operating here? I believe that although Robert recognized the advantages to the firm of improving its reputation in design circles, he and his partners did not want to have anyone on staff who was too good, who the partners would feel was looking down on them, whose talents and achievements they obviously could not begin to match. I provided the partners with a five point program which I thought addressed their problem but also recognized their apprehension over hiring top design talent. None of the recommendations I had made could achieve miracles overnight, especially because, as I later learned, even my moderate proposals had led to a certain backlash in the higher reaches of the organization. It did not surprise me, therefore, when I visited the firm one year later, to find out that they still had not been able to win a major design award. On this occasion, a senior partner asked to see me alone for an hour. He had been very skeptical of Robert’s attempt to hire good designers. Then berating me for my advice, he spent the hour showing me his design work, crowing that surely it was much better than the work of the "la-di-das", his term for characterizing the two new designers. Just as the designer launches preemptive attacks on potential critics, and must do because of the special function the design plays in resolving his inner conflicts, so we can say that this firm launched a preemptive attack on the designers they hired. This process of first integrating and then ejecting the designer is a very familiar one in the history of architecture firms. A very successful New York firm was concerned about the media's attention to new designers. So they hired a talented young designer, I will call him Jay, whose work attracted the attention of the architecture critic for the New York Times. Jay was the most prominent designer in this firm for a period of three years. Then suddenly his name disappeared from the ranks. It was clear that his presence irritated the other partners. They felt that the publicity he was getting them, was obscuring their identity. Some partners thought that he was commanding too much time and attention in terms of the firm’s resources and the more publicity he got the more he demanded that he be given the best projects. So they kicked him out. We might wonder why Jay, or someone like him, could not have been both brilliant and modest, surely then the firm would not have ejected him. But as my description of the psychodynamics of creativity suggest, this is like wishing for the tooth fairy. The latter’s existence is logically possible but hardly plausible. The artist designer grows into his talent only by being injured and remaining fragile, which typically he compensates for by being narcissistic or aggressive, often both. It is interesting in this regard to consider another anecdote. In one firm with which I did some work, the partners chose to cope with the personalities of their designers by organizing a systematic review process. At the quarterly meetings of the partnership, two days would be spent reviewing the total output of the firm from different perspectives: aesthetics, design quality, construction time, match to user needs, client satisfaction, and cost. The chairman of the firm and several partners told me that they thought the process had achieved its goals: the firm was profitable, and it had a reputation among clients and designers throughout the world for doing superior work. None of them told me, however,---because most of them did not know,---what I found out later to be the case, namely that the leading designers in the firm experienced these meetings as tremendously disturbing. Before each set of meetings, the design architects as a group met for an entire day among themselves at their home offices, going over all the questions that they feared might be raised about their work. They made sure to exclude all engineering staff, construction administrators, and managerial personnel from these sessions. Provisional Solutions How are firms able to support and integrate the brilliant designer for as long as they do? I am asking the question with respect to so-called comprehensive firms, which work on a broad range of building types, and include partners representing the many specialties that are required for the production of a building. Obviously the problem is quite different when design architects are heads of their own firms. Then the problem is how architects with other skills learn to tolerate the personality of the head of the firm, or how proficient the designer is in generating a viable working situation for architects who are not designers. There is also another model of practice which cannot be ignored, namely the design firm that is set up by a group of talented designers. These firms are often started by young architects who formerly worked in a practice led by a single master, and then left it together, hoping to capitalize on their experience and talents as a collectivity. Some of the issues that emerge in the relations between design architects and other types can also develop in these settings. It is well known that no opera production can sustain too many prima donnas on stage during a single performance. And when design stars have to perform together every day, it is not surprising that these firms break apart after a while. For the medium or large sized comprehensive firm, the firm that does a broad range of building types, and includes many different kinds of people in its partnership structure, the solution is two fold, First, you need partners who feel that they themselves are sufficiently accomplished in some other sphere of architecture practice, (e.g. sales, bidding, or construction management). At that point they can afford or at least can tolerate the encounter with the designer. Still, the tension is always present, and privately these non-design types will complain about what they have had to endure from the designers, they make fun of their foibles, tell jokes about their shortcomings, indeed, make them out to be more unworldly than in fact successful designers are. A second thing firms do is to isolate the designer. It is as if the psycho-social condition of the artist, in which he stands alone in the struggle to resolve his own inner conflicts, is reproduced in the structure of the firm. I am familiar with one very successful firm owned by a master architectural entrepreneur. I will call him Daniel. Only in the last few years has he become psychologically capable of hiring a distinguished designer in his firm and giving him sufficient influence---so that he can reach partnership. When Daniel first hired the designer he announced to the world that he was going to make him director of design and that this person would have general responsibility for overseeing and critiquing all the projects that went through the firm. But this could not be tolerated by the other architects. The designer went around telling people how lousy their work was. Daniel recognized that this person was valuable. So Daniel set him up in a separate department, and he let the designer run that department but allowed him no authority in the rest of the firm. This department also specializes in the part of the market where considerations of superior design are given more weight by clients, for example, museums, and university and prep school buildings. In other words, Daniel developed a structure to isolate a talented but understandably opinionated architect from the rest of the organization. On the appropriate occasions the other architects in the firm could take pleasure and credit in the designer’s achievement while in other situations they could simply shunt him aside. In Sum We have a bias as psychoanalytically informed thinkers to value integration--that which is whole and complete. But this bias will not serve us well when we try to understand the role of the creative person in the organization. The case of the architect-designer may be an unusual one, since it represents the only situation where an artistic activity is actually licensed as a profession. But I do think it highlights some general principles. 1. The process of becoming creative is an injurious one. It involves experiences of submission and humiliation. 2. The process of creating requires destruction. The successful artist revises his work in "cold blood" by introjecting the voices of his teachers and mentors who he once experienced as cruel. 3. People are driven to create in order to resolve inner conflicts, to overcome the chaotic qualities of their inner world, by introjecting the created work they have produced, by identifying with the creation whose raw materials was in fact the part objects of their inner world. 4. The creative accomplishment is always fragile. This is because it rests on an imaginative leap rather than a scientific formula, and because the conflict that stimulates it can be re-lived innumerable times. This fragility in turn sustains a climate of chaos and abuse as the artist relates defensively to critics, and also to admirers. 5. In architecture firms there can arise the need or wish to integrate the creative designers into the firm, to make his creative process and products part of the firm’s culture and achievements. This sets up its own climate of destructiveness as people wrestle with the feelings of having been diminished by another’s talent. This experience recalls for some their own failed attempts to become a creative designer. 6. The best way to contain the violence created by this socialized creative process is to isolate the designer, but in way that will harness his talents for the benefit of the enterprise as a whole. The diminution that occurs over time in the quality of work in even the best design firms is an indication of how difficult it to harness this process effectively. It is ironic but I think true, that our most creative achievements are built on destructive processes. As firms in all sectors of the economy become increasingly dependent on the creativity of their employees, it is interesting to think if, and how, these dilemmas will be played out on a broader basis.