**MAXIMALIST APPROACHES** to architecture need not be limited by moralist modernist maxims nor devolve toward superficial and meaningless decorative glosses (Studies for Grant School Library, Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District)

Most of us intuit that it is within the brain that all our thinking takes place, where our minds, the feeling of a self, the experience of our own existence resides (“I Think Therefore I Am” as Rene Descartes put it). But we now know that our brain and our mind are not the same even though we, the descendants of the Age of Enlightenment, tend to conflate them.

**REDUCTIVE APPROACHES** to the philosophy of the mind (i.e. Descarte’s “Cogito, Ergo Sum”), sympathetic to scientific and engineering ambitions rather than artistic ones, have captured modern sensibilities, priorities, thoughts, and actions since the founding of this country.

**THE ENGINEER’S MIND** was beheld by modern architects a century ago as the apotheosis of the development of the human mind and one that architects should cultivate, when of course, we know better now. (Le Corbusier, “Towards a New Architecture”, 1923)

In 1998 the scientist/philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers published a short paper in which they introduced the concept of “The Extended Mind” by which they meant that the generator and receiver of thoughts and feelings that we call the mind locates not within our brains, but within our environments. Our minds in their words are “embodied, embedded, and situated” meaning residing within and throughout our bodies, our relationships (with other people) and our physical settings. Active thinking—our intelligence—takes place not only within our skulls but also in relationship with a resource rich environment of places, words, images, objects, tools, other people’s bodies, thoughts, and ideas. We are our environments, and our environments are us.

**21st CENTURY ADVANCES IN THE SCIENCE OF MIND** and philosophy have begun to discover or recover a more expansive and holistic conception of how our minds work (Andy Clark and David Chalmers, authors of the 1998 white paper “Extended Mind, left; Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Extended Mind” a compendium of the last two decades of research on the topic, right)

**MIGRATING METAHPORS OF THE MIND** across the 20th century have influenced everything from elementary school education to advanced philosophy.

**THE TRUTH OF MIND BODY INTEGRATION** for any athlete, dancer or yoga practitioner need not have required scientific validation.

**INTELLIGENCE RESIDES WITHIN THE TOOLS** we adopt, our tools being more than mere facilitators or recordings of thoughts.

**NONE OF THIS IS A SURPRISE** for architects for whom drawings and models are not just tools but the means with which we think and contain thought.

Clark’s and Chalmers’ thesis prompted a flurry of research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Should it bear scientific scrutiny and practical application out of it would cascade new insights about what architects do and how we do it, or even just a new vocabulary with which to describe it. It would yield new perspectives on what architects already know—that how and why the tools we use, the people we associate with (predecessors, peers, collaborators, communities) and the places we create matter. It would suggest a new model of how we think (and learn) not only as information processors or willful instigators, but also as cultivators and harvesters of resources.

**COLLAGE CITY OF THE MIND** (and the city as the fullest expression and greatest achievement of the human mind) is finally the point at which we arrive at the conclusion of “Collage City” (Rowe and Koetter) assisted by the insights of “The Savage Mind” (anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss).

**A CURATED COLLECTION OF ARTIFACTS** arranged within and upon a stable substrate or framework (like a museum exhibit or a cabinet of curiosities) is the paradigm with which to apprehend the city put forth in “Collage City”, the most illustrative and illustrious example being the eternal city, Rome.

**ROME’S 1ST INCARNATION** was an incremental accumulation of discrete and embedded objects. (Model and map of ancient Rome)

**ROME’S 2ND INCARNATION** was the result of its near destruction from 400-1400 AD and its rebuilding in the 16th and 17th centuries upon the remnants of its first incarnation. (Nolli map of Baroque Rome)

**ROME’S CURRENT INCARNATION** consists mostly of 18th and 19th extensions of the boundaries of its 2nd incarnation with modern transportation and utility infrastructure laid upon it.

A half a century ago Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter with the help of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss anticipated this insight in their book “Collage City” which was about how to re-think cities offered as a reform of the pseudo-scientific modernist paradigm that had dominated 20th century theory and practice over a half century prior. By looking at cities (mature ones) and the architecture of their buildings (accomplished ones) as open-ended scaffoldings of ideas and images collaged onto stable, structured substrates, (geography, blocks and streets, infrastructure, technologies and economies of construction) we would better understand how to introduce interventions in them that leverage the wealth of resources they offer-- their underlying and enduring patterns of development, their variety of singular events and places, their fluid, fertile exchanges of motivations, meanings, styles and identities over time-- their histories and traditions as well as their hopes for and visions of their futures that in summation yield their satisfyingly ineffable complexity.

**20TH CENTURY ARTISTS**, beginning with Picasso adopted techniques that Levi-Strauss identified as that of the pre-scientific “bricoleur’s” mindset (Frank Ghery, above; Joseph Cornell, middle; Michel Basquiat, below)

**DESIGNERS OF CLOTHING AND INTERIORS** have adopted without hesitation the mindset of the collagist, making use of whatever is at hand in imitation of the magpie’s nest building *modus operandi*.

“Collage City” presented a new way to apprehend cities and interventions in them, a correction of the one-dimensionally engineered modern city on the one hand and the superficially ornamental, balloon-and-banner-festooned antidotes to it on the other. But, toward the end of it we realize that it’s also a metaphor, an articulation of a new maxim about how to think about how architects think. In his book “The Savage Mind” Levi-Strauss contrasted a new kind of mind, that of the” engineer” (or scientist) so beloved by modernist architects with the pre-scientific mind, that of the “bricoleur” (collagist or artist). He identifies the former as one that figures out what they want to do then finds the resources to do it (titanium for rockets, lithium for batteries), the ends determining the means, and the latter as one that makes something of whatever’s found-, the means determining the ends (Joseph Cornell, Jean-Michell Basquiat). In “Collage City” Rowe and Koetter point out that the mind of the architect--neither engineer nor artist, or rather both—resides somewhere between.

**ANDY CLARK** has perhaps more than anyone contributed to our holistic understanding of how our “embodied, embedded and situated” minds work, overturning paradigms that have been in place since Descartes

**ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND AUTOMATION** will change the nature of work and perhaps bring us full circle to the cultivation of our pre-scientific, artistic minds. (Jaron Lanier, Silicon Valley pioneer and currently Virtual Reality consultant for Microsoft)

We realize that if we were to think of our minds, like cities, as structured and open-ended scaffoldings upon which to append and blend a wealth of resources (analyses, calculations, technologies, ideas, metaphors, and images) were we to cultivate maximally informed, flexible minds, open to old and new things, sensitive to the fungible nature of context and meaning—a “collage city of the mind”—or in other words as Andy Clark concluded in his book “Supersizing the Mind” (written a decade after the “The Extended Mind”) were we to properly think of our minds and intelligence as “adaptively potent mashups extruded from a dizzying motely of heterogeneous elements and processes” our individual and collective capacity for invention would break free of the relentlessly mind-numbing poverty of thinking in the theory and practice of architecture and urban in which we find ourselves today.

Maximalism, A Maxim /November 15, 2021 by Johnson Favaro

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