VALUE MINIATURIZATION

“The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. One must go beyond logic to experience what is large in what is small.”

This is from Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, page 150.

For me, the key word in his passage above is the word values. We considered previously the immense scale change that occurs in our creative work from drawing to a building.

Yet Bachelard asks us to consider that in a design process, values become miniaturized. The values that we take into our problem solving become compressed.  There is a change of scale in our design values.

So what he is saying is that when we are drawing, when we are problem solving, we are compressing and miniaturizing the design precepts, the design values.  I’ve never thought about it in quite this way.

Your transparent drawing on your 5 x 8 piece of paper of a three dimensional envelope is rediculously smaller than the building it will be. And as you draw on your 5 x 8 piece of paper, you also must compress your client’s desires for a gable roof, or for a south facing wall with lots of windows. The act of problem solving for buildings requires an analogous change of scale for the values that inform the design problem.

Again, I’ve never thought about it like this. First of all, we take for granted the scale change that we operate in. We just draw buildings on paper like it is the most natural thing in the world without considering the massive scale change of the marks that we put on the paper.

And then second, I’ve never wondered whether the values that make our clients happy and that I do my best to honor, are indeed miniaturized in my imagination as I draw.

Let’s let Bachelard have the last word.

“…imagination in miniature is natural imagination…” P149.