99% Invisible - 220- The Mind of an Architect

Episode Date: July 13, 2016

In the late 1950s, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research embarked on a mission to study the personalities of particularly creative scientists and artists. Researchers established categories, grouping analytical creatives together (including scientists and mathematicians) as well as artistic … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's this old story and it goes something like this. A visitor arrives at the pearly gates and asks St. Peter if he can meet the greatest general who ever lived, and St. Peter points out one of the people in heaven and says, there he is, the greatest general in the world, and the visitor is shocked and says, no way! That's not the greatest general. I mean, that guy isn't even a general. I knew him on earth, and he was a cobbler. I know, response St. Peter. But if he had been a general, he would have been the greatest of them all. It's a bit corny, sure, but the story raises some interesting questions. That's a general Avery Trouffman. How does a person discover their greatest

creative potential, their best skills and talents and capabilities? You might be a brilliant novelist if you could find the time, or maybe if you had the training, you could have changed the course of modern dance or particle physics or, you know, been a great general. So what makes brilliant and creative people tick? And how did they get that way? Today there are thousands of self-help books

and counselors and consultants and websites that promise to help you find your creative essence. They teach you the habits of successful, effective, and creative people. But this idea that you can study something as elusive as creativity and learn step-by-step how to be more creative, it was unthinkable back in the 1950s. Creativity has always had something magical about it, unexpected, it's surprising, and that's

why people thought that you couldn't study creativity. It was too nebulous and unconscious and not accessible to scientific inquiry. This is Ravenna Helson. My name is Ravenna Helson. I'm very old, 91. What else shall I say? Ravenna Helson is a very prominent personality psychologist and she got her start at an unusual department at UC Berkeley in 1949.

It was called the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, also known as iPAR. And what iPAR was was an institute with procedures for studying personality in a fairly new, complicated way. And we thought we were working on something really unique and good for humanity. The scientists at iPAR attempted what many people thought was impossible. This was at a time when creativity was thought to be this kind of magical, inexplicable force,

but I-PAR set out to capture it, to study it in a methodical, scientific way, and identify the specific personality traits that make certain people creative. Ipar invited a whole variety of creative people to come to Berkeley and be studied. All there's a fantasy for children. Women studying at Mills College. Research scientists. Women mathematicians.

And writers, including some real heavy hitters, like Truman Capote and William Carlos Williams. But one of the biggest and most successful studies that Ipar conducted was with architects. It's always important with the architects' show, because they were the largest sample and clearest in some ways. Over the course of four weekends in 1958 and 1959,

I part brought together 40 of the most famous and important architects in the world, observe them, gave them tests, and asked them all kinds of questions, including some fairly ridiculous ones. Now for the next 45 minutes, we would like to discuss this notion that is what if men had developed the third arm? Where am I going to sign the festive text? That is an actual recording from the actual study.

I part got really famous architects like Richard Neutra, IMPAY, Louis Con, all the big names of modern architecture. And I love that at one point they were asked to discuss where a third arm should go on the human body. I would suggest that the most effective place where if it came right out of the top of your head, I'd disagree with that. go on the human body. I part scientists observed the architects as they filled out questionnaires, made mosaics out of colored tiles, and discussed hypothetical problems together, and what they learned

helped transform the way people think about creativity today. It all started with one of the first personality psychologists, the man who founded Ipar and led the charge on the architect's study. His name was Donald McKinnon. McKinnon liked to start his speeches with that story about the visitor to heaven in St. Peter, which makes sense. McKinnon himself had a vested interest in finding the secret, great general hiding within the Cobbler,

because during World War II, he had served in the office of strategic services, which was the precursor to the CIA. McKinnon's job was to assess the personalities of American troops to see which of them could perform well in combat. When the war was over, he joined the faculty at Berkeley and founded Ipar in 1949 to continue his personality research. But in the mid-50s, Ipar switched from studying combat readiness and efficiency to creativity.

In large part because of Sputnik. The Soviets launched the Sputnik and that gave a huge priority to the study. How can we make our folks, the Americans, more creative so that we can be the Russians? The space race was part of why I par embarked on this mission. They wanted to study the personalities of particularly creative people. So they categorized a group of analytic creatives, like scientists and mathematicians, and a second group of artistic creatives,

like painters and writers. But then there was this hybrid where it was neither one nor the other, but it was both, and they put architects in that group. This is Pierre Luigi Serrino, an architect himself and author of the Creative Architect inside the great mid-century personality study, a book that chronicles iPars Architects study, because they thought architects were a perfect mix of mathematician and artist. Architects were also interesting study subjects because understanding their creative habits could

potentially apply to a lot of different kinds of people. Successful architects have to master numerous roles. They have to be businessmen, artists, engineers, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists, and educators, all rolled into one. I par wanted a huge test sample of architects from small firms and large. Some were sent surveys and participated from a distance, but an elite group was selected to come to Berkeley for in-person testing. That was the first step to identify really architect. Everybody would come up with some names, then they would rate them.

Ipar rallied a selection of architectural magazine editors and museum curators and professors to help select the most creative architects alive and working in the United States. So they come up with a chart and out of that, they say, okay, this is the letters of invitation. So some folks never return. I frankly, I never answered. But they actually did convince 40 of the architects on their list to come down on four separate weekends. And they warned them, this was not going to be easy. This is the grueling, you know, in fairness, McCain said, this is not going to be a relaxing weekend.

The tests began pretty much right away. As soon as the architects arrived at the fraternity house that I-PAR had borrowed for the study, they had just 15 minutes of introduction before they took their first test. It was constant over the course of the weekend. The architects would be asked to make mosaics to assess their aesthetic sensibilities, go into in-depth interviews about their childhoods, and even see if they could be hypnotized. And during the downtime, they were still being observed by researchers with clipboard. Even cocktails and dinners, it's a time of study.

It's a very, very tight schedule. But my favorite test that the architects did was one iParr called the ethics problem. The ethics problem? Group one. I like it because it deals with a question that comes up all the time for architects and for creative people of all kinds, actually. It's about whether a creative person should be willing to sacrifice parts of their vision to please a client.

And it's one of the tests I parted where they actually recorded the architects having this discussion. In the course of that, you realize who's self-absorbed, who is more collegial. Architects group number four on April 25th, 1959, we're going to focus on three characters, and to keep them all straight, we've got a musical cue for each one. The first and foremost is architect Ero Sarnin. He designed the St. Louis Arch, the Delas Airport, these dynamic, soaring structures that blend sculpture and architecture.

He is iconic today and was a superstar then. It was a huge deal that he participated in the study. The second character we're going to talk about in this group is Philip Johnson. The minimalist architect responsible for Lincoln Center and the glass house. His work is very square, very tidy. Actually, the selection committee described Philip Johnson as Interesting in the perfection of certain limited aims, very discipline in all of his work, completely disregards human beings.

And the third character who we'll focus on was a promising, up-and-coming architect named Victor Lundy. At 36 years old, he was the youngest and least established in the group, with a very small but very impressive portfolio. Okay, so the virtuoso, Eros Arnin, the perfectionist, Philip Johnson, and the young upstart, Victor Lundey.

Along with two other architects, were served cocktails and given a hypothetical situation concerning a hypothetical architect named Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown is faced with a difficult decision. He has just finished the preliminary drawings for a very challenging and important structure. His client has told him that he likes Mr. Brown's proposal very much, and will accept it if he will change one fairly important aspect of the design. Basically, the client would like the design altered in a specific way and says he will have to reject Mr. Brown's proposal if the change isn't made.

Brown really hates this alteration, but this commission is highly prized and prominent, and of course, Brown wants the client to be happy with the building, and he has to support himself in his practice. As he's weighing these factors, the phone rings and the client asks for his answer. If you were Brown, what would you do? The architects then had to decide. Should Brown accept the change or ditch the project? Now we'd like you to discuss the issue candidly among yourselves and reach a direct conclusion at the end of 35th anniversary.

So I mean, we have to agree. This archival audio has never been heard in any public way before, like maybe only 10 people have heard it. So just sit back for a second and listen to the architects and the ice clinking in their glasses. So Cerenin, the visionary, starts the discussion. I think John should have anticipated that John should have had some alternatives.

And Sarenin says that since Brown doesn't have any other solutions prepared, he should walk away. He has to be willing to drop the job at this time, or else he has no future. It doesn't happen that way in architecture. That's Philip, disregard human beings, Johnson butting in. It's a problem that's contrary to experience. It sounds very much like you've been reading Iron Rand. It sounds like you've been reading Iron Rand. Johnson is referencing the book The Fountainhead,

where the main character is a fiercely independent architect who blows up his own building rather than compromise with a client. Make no mistake, Johnson would also refuse the client's changes. But he just thinks this whole scenario is absurd. No good architect would let this happen with a client. Now, I answered there that I would immediately refuse it because I was a that stupid and architect, and had that stupid client that would let this particular occurrence,

and I never heard of it happening of other architects, either. Actually, Sarenin has been challenged by a client on a recent commission, and he is threatening to quit. Just Monday, I have to get to them and I expect me to quit. You expect to win by a thread of quitting. I say that the only power an architect has against the plan is the power of resigning. It can only resign once if it is the case is hopeless. Would you say that the case is hopeless as intended in the problem?

That's Victor Lundy, the young gun, piping up. I confess that I have to admit the possibility of of learning something from the client. Maybe there's something in what the client is leading to that will result in a better thing. If a work of architecture is really, really good, well then the owner will see it. And um... I just say yes. Well, you're young. Well, no. I'm young, but I've seen some old things.

There's snobbery in some of this. If you could have been now, the design can only get worse and worse for your reputation. Because once you're represented by a building you don't believe in, what is the future of living? At the end of 35 minutes, the group concluded that Mr. Brown should reject the client's changes and walk away from the project. This was the conclusion that all of the different architect groups ultimately came to. Having this option is part of the luxury of being a very famous architect, of course. I hope in all of this that Mr. Brown was right. I think he was.

Ha ha ha! Maybe the client was right. After three grueling days of tests, after all the architects went back to their respective practices all over the country, the study still wasn't quite over. The architects were mailed surveys and questionnaires and they were asked to rank each other. Some architects refused to rank themselves and their peers. Others jumped right in.

Philip Johnson raided himself number one. As surprisingly, but Sarah and Enraged Johnson number two, after himself, consider number one. But the fact that people put themselves number one, it also talks about the conception of themselves clearly. And the architects' conceptions of themselves matched with the findings from a lot of the other studies that I-PAR had done over the years. The researchers began to notice certain patterns

across creatives of all professions and all genders. We kept finding that we got the same characteristics associated with the people who were rated highest, whether they were chemists or artists or in other fields. It turns out all different kinds of creative people met similar descriptions. It has an interesting and arresting personality. It is non-conforming and has high aspirations for self. Also, creatives preferred complexity and ambiguity over simplicity and order. Creatives had the capacity to make unexpected connections and see patterns in daily life.

But creative people didn't necessarily have to have high IQs. Intelligence isn't as important to creativity as people had thought it was. And so I guess that's another thing we found. Average intelligence will do. And it's not as if this is directly related to intelligence, but the school grade point average for the architects was a solid B-. So I par found that creative people tend to be non-conforming, interesting, interested, independent, courageous, and self-centered.

They tend to be. They don't have to be. You have certain traits and they come up over and over again and that's the creative personality, but it doesn't mean that they're going to be exactly the same. I feel like I kind of could have guessed all those, right? I think it's a lot easier to say, oh, we should know that all along after we've found it. This idea of the creative personality was remarkable at the time. I-Pars findings were lauded and spread.

But over the years, people began to think about personality differently. In the 70s, an argument was emerging that maybe personality wasn't something innate within us, and maybe personalities are the results of our environments and social expectations. Ipar and their mission were called into question. The 1970s was a terrible period for personality psychologists. Ooh, I should tell you about that. We had trouble getting grants, we had trouble getting papers accepted, and we had this horrible empty feeling ourselves.

Ipar ended in 1992 and became what is now known as Ipser, the Institute of Personality and Social Research, which has expanded to focus a lot more on social and cultural context beyond analyzing individuals. But just because people aren't using iPAR's methods does not mean the study was all for not. iPAR did prove that creativity wasn't this mysterious, untouchable thing. The studies in iPAR are really sort of iconic in our field. This is Ocean Vartanian of the University of Toronto. His area of expertise is creativity and aesthetics research. If you take any kind of course on creativity either at the undergraduate or graduate level,

the iPAR studies are always covered because they're considered to be the birthplace of the scientific study of creative personality. Today, researchers don't study creativity as a complete concept like iPAR tried to. Instead of studying it as a whole topic, they tend to break it up into pieces. The chunk that I'm particularly interested in is the neuroscience of creativity. So essentially, what happens in the brain when a person comes up with some kind of a creative idea? Ocean also studies architects and their creativity. But rather than using, say, hypothetical discussion questions, he will put them into an FMRI machine to look at blood flow in the brain. Because now there are novel methods whereby you can

actually have people design things in the FMRI scanner, as the person is really kind of coming up with a room design and the parts of the brain that are involved in that. But even though oceans techniques are really high tech, his research has its roots in these iPAR studies. He thinks that they were really significant. One of the major contributions that they made was to actually show that personality is a viable topic to study if you want to understand creativity. And if nothing else, the lasting legacy of these

iPAR studies, maybe these recordings of these great architects as they discuss essential creative problems, like where on the body to put a third arm. Then it would be rather unsymmetrical. I don't think it would be as pleasant as if we could. It could be four arms. It's to me four arms is much more validity. I'm a Paul. I'd be talking about 40 back minutes for three arms.

Yes. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Avery Truffleman With Katie Mangle, Kurt Colstead, Sam Green's band Delaney Hall, Shereef Yusef, and me Roman Moors. Special thanks this week to Raymond Neutra and Elizabeth Peale and Robert Levinson of Ipser, original music this week by Sean Rial of the band Little Teeth. The archival audio recordings are courtesy of Ipsir, UC Berkeley and Monichelli Press, the publisher of Pier Luigi's book, The Creative Architect, inside the great mid-century personality study.

The book goes into more depth about the architect's study and has images of all these interesting surveys and documents, including pictures of the mosaics the architects were asked to make. Victor Lundy, for example, used a whole rainbow of colors. Philip Johnson used only three colors, and Eros Arnan used only one color. You can see them for yourself at 99pi.org. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco, and even though we can still feel their warm embrace, we are no longer produced on the offices of ArcSign, so you guys should stop coming by unannounced because

they got jobs to do and we're not there anyway. However, we do remain in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, follow us all on Twitter and Instagram by the best way to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world Radio Tepia.