Dear Cheryl,
I thank Eduardo for saving me much writing! I agree.
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr. Terence Love
Dept of Design
Curtin University
Perth, Western Australia
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Visiting researcher
IADE/UNIDCOM
Lisboa, Portugal
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-----Original Message-----
From: Eduardo Corte-Real
Sent: 1/06/2004 12:20 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: sorry, all over again - second call for rescue Re: generic design cognition Re: some questions on design cognition
Dear Cheryl:
Thanks for waking us up from growing cognition anaesthesia. Bringing
aesthetics cognition or cognition through sensible perception serves a cup
of coffee on the discussion.
Terry's question was pertinent. Your answer was also pertinent.
Summarizing it, I should say that institutions of aesthetical
understanding labelled engineering structures as passable for
aesthetical "reading" because art itself was being inquired from the
structural point of view. For the common Joe Does passing through a bridge
or delivering grain to a silo become both doing it and admire it while
doing it. For the common Le Corbusiers it became a place where beauty was
accessible for further production of beauty and for the common Wim Wenders
was the place for beauty as a landscape.
I don't know if this is common in other countries, but in Portugal
engineers refers to bridges as works of art. For instance, a road building
commission will include three works of art because there will be three
bridges. The road itself is a plain engineering problem while the bridges
are designated as works of art. If you drive through a Portuguese free-way
you will find that there is no standardisation on bridges. Each one is a
problem that is solved not to be beautiful for visual perception but, I
believe this to be true, for aesthetical mathematical perception.
There is a bridge in Oporto, S. Joao Bridge, designed to endure trains
moving at 120 km/h with the slimmest figure. The engineer, the late
Professor Edgar Cardoso claimed that the idea for the pillars came to him
while cutting a carrot. In fact they look like truncated carrots. The
bridge is one of the most beautiful objects ever built in Portugal. But
its beauty doesn't ends on its external features. Inside the concrete
outline there is a system of moveable configuration that will resist to
sudden stops or accelerations of brutal trains.
I think that Terry was referring to this. Not to the aesthetic perception
of features of engineered forms but to the aesthetic perception of
functioning forms expressed in mathematical terms. Beautiful mathematical
expressions resists all aesthetical theories unless institutional
theories. Sensible perception is substituted, at the limit, by sensible
reasoning instituted by those able to identify beautiful mathematical
solutions and ugly mathematical solutions.
Your posts triggered many other questions, which I generally agree since
they are, definitely, determinant for cultural institution of
design "whenification". I'll try to address it later.
Best,
Eduardo
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