14 Quotes by Peter F. Smith

Metaphor avoids the representational image and leaves the percipient with work to do to unravel the connection. It is counterpoint on the emotional level. Making that connection is a creative act and thus a form of aesthetic experience. Where the correspondence is on the level of simile rather than metaphor it runs the danger of being counter-productive. One would avoid a burger bar shaped like a burger.

…the underpinning principle behind aesthetic experience is that of complexity giving way to orderliness. Clash is an essential component of aesthetic perception. Resolution of clash delivers aesthetic reward.

This is the essence of cognitive adjustment; the continuous adjustment of the environmental mental model to achieve and even-better fit between expectations and reality; to push back the boundaries of uncertainty.

The human mind is genetically attuned to pick out points of affinity within the complex stream of sensory information reaching the brain, because pattern equals redundancy. A pattern is a way of ‘chunking’ an array of information so that it takes up less attentional space. […] The more the mind can store information in this way, the more free capacity it has available to cope with novelty and surprise.

What Zeki suggests is that a principle function of art is to reveal the order and constancy which underpins the fast-moving events of life. It enables us to stand back from the rush of incidents to contemplate what T.S. Eliot called ‘the still point of the turning circle’.

Buildings are the pressure cookers of cultural change.

One effect of all this is that towers, especially when associated with religious buildings, carry a powerful symbolic charge which greatly adds to their informational weight.

However, it is on the grand scale of cities like Amsterdam or Bruges and towns like Goslar that the archetypal contest between order and anarchy is played out with gusto. They are a kind of parable, externalising the triumph of order and harmony over dissonance, remembering that harmony depends as much on clash as correspondence.

Cities are architecture plus space and time.