GESTALT and IMPLIED CONTINUANCE

Read between these lines.
"Jack be nimble, -------- be quick," and "She cuts like a ----------."

I bet you inserted the words "Jack" and "Knife". You may have heard "Jack Knife".

Humans have a predisposition for finishing things IN OUR MINDS.

Knowing what NOT to say, what to leave unsaid, is a powerful communication tool. Knowing what NOT to paint or sculpt, what to leave out, is a powerful touching tool.

What we perceive in our minds is our personal reality.

This innate ability "to close the gap" or "make quantum connections" is Gestalt Psychology.

Dr. C. George Boeree. (http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/gestalt.html) states

"The word Gestalt means a unified or meaningful whole Gestalt psychology is based on the observation that we often experience things that are not a part of our simple sensations.  The original observation was Wertheimer's," (the founder of the Gestalt Psychological Movement) "when he noted that we perceive motion where there is nothing more than a rapid sequence of individual sensory events.  This is what he saw in the toy stroboscope he bought at the Frankfurt train station, and what he saw in his laboratory when he experimented with lights flashing in rapid succession (like the Christmas lights that appear to course around the tree, or the fancy neon signs in Las Vegas that seem to move).  The effect is called the phi phenomenon, and it is actually the basic principle of motion pictures!

If we see what is not there, what is it that we are seeing?  You could call it an illusion, but its not a hallucination.  Wetheimer explained that you are seeing an effect of the whole event, not contained in the sum of the parts.  We see a coursing string of lights, even though only one light lights at a time, because the whole event contains relationships among the individual lights that we experience as well.

Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists, we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations.  And not only do we have the ability to do so, we have a strong tendency to do so. (Ditto!) We even add structure to events which do not have gestalt structural qualities.

In perception, there are many organizing principles called gestalt laws.  The most general version is called the law of pragnanz.  Pragnanz is German for pregnant, but in the sense of pregnant with meaning, rather than pregnant with child.  This law says that we are innately driven to experience things in as good a gestalt as possible. "Good" can mean many things here, such a regular, orderly, simplicity, symmetry, and so on, which then refer to specific gestalt laws."

How then does Gestalt Psychology describe how we perceive architecture?

Go back to our earlier chats. "One plus One is Three. The One, The Other and the Space Between. In that Space is Everything."

Walls and ceilings and floors, columns and shadow and light, form and define space. These definers don't have to be complete to form the perception of closure or reality. While the creator might present a brilliant idea, the mind of the participant viewer is the greater artist or architect or writer for we individually fill in the blanks, complete the thought, close the gap of meaning.

Good architecture must hint at enclosure, must implore and entice movement, suggest, not demand experience. Like a good sentence, "The whale sized boulder pushed its belly down on the swimmer, tank clanging against the smooth granite skin, the sand below scraping the facemask." How much further, she thought."

Tight, compressive, scary place. A cave.

Today we can construct virtually anything. We can virtually construct anything. The fusion of human crafted computers and computer crafted humans allows perfect detailing of everything.

With so much perfect detail, so much perfectly thought out and finished stuff, the gaps are all filled in. Perfectly. There is little now left to the imagination we miss out on the deeply satisfying experience of making the connections ourselves, in our minds.

It's the difference between pornography and suggestive art.

I think this is where flirting comes from. We dance about the edge of possibility, making more pregnant those moments of "what if". Flirting with architecture better said being flirted with by architecture, feels good. It simply feels good. It gets the endorphins and dopamines coursing through the blood. It's the drug of Living Architecture.

It is Zenitecture.

Marley Porter