GESTALT — WHEN THE GROUND BECOMES FIGURE

This is where Wurster's educational experiment connects directly to my ideas concerning Gestalt psychology and multistable perception.

Gestalt demonstrates that figure and ground are not permanently fixed. What appears dominant in one perceptual configuration can suddenly recede, while something previously regarded as background moves forward and becomes figure.

The object has not necessarily changed. The relationship has changed. Something similar occurred within the College of Environmental Design. For much of architectural education, buildings occupied the position of figure.

The architect occupied the position of figure. Formal composition occupied the position of figure, and the people inhabiting those environments easily became ground. Wurster's curricular reconsideration begins to reverse that relationship.

BUILDING → USER
OBJECT → EXPERIENCE
ARCHITECT → INHABITANT
FORM → RELATIONSHIP
EXPERTISE → PARTICIPATION

The background begins moving forward. People who were treated largely as occupants of architecture become participants in understanding and producing the environment.

And he hoped that once that perceptual reversal occurred, it would become difficult to see architecture in the same way again.

THE INSTITUTIONAL AHA MOMENT

This resembles the Aha moment at another scale.

An Aha moment occurs when the elements of a problem may remain essentially the same, but their relationship is suddenly reorganized.

Nothing necessarily has to be added. Something previously present but unnoticed becomes visible.

The breakthrough comes from seeing differently.

Wurster's reform of architectural education can therefore be interpreted as an institutional version of productive thinking.

Rather than merely producing better solutions within the inherited definition of architecture, the curriculum begins questioning the definition of the problem itself.

Perhaps the problem was not:

How should we design buildings?

Perhaps the deeper question was:

How do human beings inhabit environments, and how can architecture participate responsibly in that relationship?

That was a profound perceptual shift.