Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Creative Architect
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1965
WEBSITE: http://www.pierluigiserraino.com/
CITY: San Francisco Bay area
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.monacellipress.com/book/?isbn=9781580934251 * http://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/architectchats-episode-9-with-pierluigi-serraino-on-creativity-in-architecture_o * https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierluigi-serraino-a68683
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1965.
EDUCATION:University of Rome, Laurea, 1992; Southern California Institute of Architecture, M.Arch., 1996; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A., 1998.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Architect and writer. Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, designer, 2001-03; Anshen+Allen Architects, architect, 2003-09; Pierluigi Serrano Architecture, design architect, 2009–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Architectural Record, Architecture California, Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Design.
SIDELIGHTS
Pierluigi Serraino earned his undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Rome in 1992, and he earned his master’s degree in the same subject from the Southern California Institute of Architecture four year later. Serraino completed a second master’s at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998. He began his architecture career at Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP, working as a designer from 2001 to 2003, before becoming an architect at Anshen+Allen Architects, where he worked between 2003 and 2009. Serraino then went on to found his own architecture firm. His projects support multiphase design and sustainability as well as digital technology.
Serraino is the author of several books on modern design, and his articles have appeared in such periodicals as the Architectural Record, Architecture California, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Design. In his 2016 book The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, the author offers a detailed overview of a pivotal 1959 study conducted by the University of California’s Institute of Personality Assessment. The study, which attempted to trace the roots and functions of creativity, centered on forty prominent midcentury modern architects, the author explains. Held over the course of three days, the study included interviews, personality tests, performance tests, and psychological tests. Community perception was also explored, as participants were asked to assess each other’s talents on the first day of the study (when, perhaps unsurprisingly, several individuals ranked themselves as the most talented).
The Creative Architect reprints many of these tests, allowing readers insight into the study as well as the opportunity to test themselves. The book also shares the study’s results, noting that most participants were introverts and nonconformists who were able to perceive subtle design problems where others saw none. Participants worked not only to solve these problems, but to do so in an economical and surprising way. The author reports that the general personality traits of a creative person were easier to quantify than the process of creativity itself.
Reviews of The Creative Architect were largely positive. A Publishers Weekly critic called the book a “highly entertaining look at an unusual event in the history of American architecture.” Annie Coggan, writing on the AIA New York Web site, was also impressed, asserting that “the notion that an effectiveness study could translate into a study of creativity runs throughout the book. According to Serraino, the rush to define and codify creativity was derived from America’s shock that Sputnik got Russia into space before the U.S.” Coggan went on to declare: “This book is a fascinating yet decidedly historic account of an architect’s mind.” Indeed, as Mimi Zeiger pointed out for Architect magazine, “Serraino’s book is remarkable in its reproductions of bureaucratic artifacts from the study, including examples of mimeographed questionnaires used to evaluate possible participants.” The critic added: “Serraino writes that the experiment findings influenced the nascent technology industry in nearby Silicon Valley, and eventually entered mainstream culture though lectures and radio shows, which goes a long way in explaining why the results sound so familiar. Today, the individualistic signifiers of creativity populate everything from advertising to app development, from bespoke fashion to the share economy. There are meditation workshops to unleash creativity, books on design thinking, and businesses of all kinds that value anything that will produce ‘out of the box’ ideas.”
In the words of online Brain Pickings correspondent Maria Popova, “Serraino delves into the finer details of the study, down to the original handwritten questionnaires, to reveal the inner workings of the creative mind and the equally fascinating meta-creativity of designing and implementing this enormously inventive, daring, influential, and still unparalleled study.” Another positive assessment appeared in the Wall Street Journal, where Christine Cipriani remarked: “While the book’s clever design recalls a Cold War white paper, the text is rough editorially. … Yet Mr. Serraino has done a great service in excavating this episode. … What finally makes The Creative Architect so compelling is the fact that so many of these gifted introverts traveled to Berkeley in the first place, hungry to meet their peers and curious, in a larger sense, about who they were and what in the world they were doing.” Commending the volume for the San Francisco Chronicle, John King observed: “One of architecture’s virtues is that it allows us to look at buildings and see the sensibilities of an era—the cultural values and blind spots, as well as the fundamental traits that never go out of style. Turns out the same can be said for architects. If you don’t believe me, then take a plunge into The Creative Architect.” According to King, the book offers a “thoroughly captivating dissection.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, March 1, 2001, David Soltesz, review of Modernism Rediscovered/Die wiederentdeckte Moderne/La redécouverte d’un modernism, p. 83.
Publishers Weekly, May 9, 2016, review of The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, p. 61.
Reference & Research Book News, November, 2006, review of NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernist Architecture.
San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 2016, John King, review of The Creative Architect.
Whole Earth, summer, 2001, Carol Cooper, review of Modernism Rediscovered, p. 57.
ONLINE
AIA New York Web site, http://main.aiany.org/ (October 27, 2016), Annie Coggan, review of The Creative Architect.
Architect Online, http://www.architectmagazine.com/ (July 29, 2016), “ArchitectChats: Episode 9 with Pierluigi Serraino on Creativity in Architecture”; (August 31, 2016), Mimi Zeiger, review of The Creative Architect.
Brain Pickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/ (December 29, 2016), Maria Popova, review of The Creative Architect.
Pierluigi Serraino Home Page, http://www.pierluigiserraino.com (March 2, 2017).
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (August 5, 2016), Christine Cipriano, review of The Creative Architect.*
Pierluigi Serraino
Architect
San Francisco Bay AreaArchitecture & Planning
Current
Pierluigi Serraino Architecture
Previous
Anshen+Allen Architects, Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM)
Education
University of California, Los Angeles
218
connectionsConnectMore options
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierluigi-serraino-a68683
Contact Info
Posts
Published by PierluigiSee more
Podcast with Debbie Millman on "The Creative Architect"
Podcast with Debbie Millman on "The Creative...
November 15, 2016
John King of San Francisco Chronicle on "The Creative Architect"
John King of San Francisco Chronicle on "The...
August 17, 2016
DWELL on "The Creative Architect"
DWELL on "The Creative Architect"
August 16, 2016
Background
Experience
Design Architect
Pierluigi Serraino Architecture
2009 – Present (8 years)San Francisco Bay Area
Architect
Anshen+Allen Architects
June 2003 – June 2009 (6 years 1 month)San Francisco Bay Area
Designer
Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM)
January 2001 – May 2003 (2 years 5 months)San Francisco Bay Area
Skills
Top Skills
12Architectural Design
8Design Research
8Sustainable Design
4Comprehensive Planning
4Submittals
4SketchUp
3Revit
3Residential Design
2BIM
2LEED AP
Pierluigi also knows about...
2Mixed-use
2AutoCAD Architecture
2Interior Architecture
1Steel Detailing
1Space-planning
Education
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
Master of Arts (M.A.), Architecture
1996 – 1998
Southern California Institute of Architecture
Southern California Institute of Architecture
M_ARCH, Architecture
1994 – 1996
Universita` degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza"
Laurea, Architecture, Cum Laude
1985 – 1992
Additional Info
Interests
Digital Design, Collaborative Technologies, Architectural Design, Architectural Photography, Architectural Theory, Building Science, Public Speaking, Rhetoric
Organizations
Additional Organizations
Currently licensed to practice architecture in CA Currently licensed to practice architecture in Italy
July 29, 2016
4
4
PODCAST
ArchitectChats: Episode 9 with Pierluigi Serraino on Creativity in Architecture
We dig into a little-known study that got into the heads of the most renowned midcentury architects to answer one, seemingly simple question: What makes a creative person so creative?
By ARCHITECT STAFF
You've seen ARCHITECT in print and online, but have you heard us? You can now, loud and clear, with our new podcast, ArchitectChats. Here, our editors talk with the people who are working at the cutting edge of design, technology, and practice in architecture. We'll talk with them about what they're doing, where they're headed, and how you can learn from it.
Pierluigi Serraino, AIA
Vittoria Zupicich
Pierluigi Serraino, AIA
In a study lost to the annals of architectural history, 40 of the 20th-century's most prominent architects were invited over the course of a few weekends in the late 1950s to the University of California, Berkeley, where they were evaluated for their presumed creative genius. The researchers, from the school's Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), wanted to know how factors in a person's life and environment shaped their creative aptitude. Particularly intrigued by architects for their mix of design and business savvy, the researchers attempted to get inside the minds of Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, FAIA, and others. The study received significant media attention at the time it was undertaken, but little on it was ever published, and what it determined about creativity in general and in architecture specifically was unearthed only recently.
In his book, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study (The Monacelli Press, 2016), Pierluigi Serraino, AIA, revisits the study and its implications. We talked with the Alameda, Calif.–based architect and author about what he learned during his research, and whether a similar attempt at understanding the minds of the world's leading architects could be executed today.
Pierluigi Serraino, AIA, is an architect, author, and educator. He holds multiple professional and research degrees in architecture from Italy and the United States and has over 15 years of work experience as a design architect. Prior to opening his independent design practice, Pierluigi worked on a variety of residential and institutional projects in the United States and overseas at Mark Mack Architects; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and Anshen+Allen.
Our office offers significant expertise in program-intensive projects and a deep commitment to sustainable practices. We follow a rigorous quality control program throughout all design phases. Well-versed in working in multidisciplinary teams, we engage in a dynamic relationship with clients and consultants. The strategic implementation of the latest digital technologies allows us to meet clients’ needs while keeping within the budget.
Pierluigi has lectured in museums and institutions of higher learning on postwar American architecture, California modernism, architectural photography, changes in architectural practice, and digital design. Drawing on his in-depth expertise in modern architecture, he has devoted part of his design practice to rehabilitating, remodeling, and adding to mid-century modern residential and commercial properties.
His work and writing have been published in professional and scholarly journals such as Architectural Record, Architecture California, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Design (UK). He has authored four books, among them Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen 2000) and NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism (Chronicle Books, 2006), and numerous essays.
The Creative Architect: Inside the Great
Midcentury Personality Study
Publishers Weekly.
263.19 (May 9, 2016): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study
Pierluigi Serraino. Monacelli, $45 (248p) ISBN 9781580934251
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Serraino (Modernism Rediscovered) creates a detailed, fascinating account of the forgotten moment in 1959 when 40
preeminent modern architects were summoned to the University of California's Institute of Personality Assessment
and Research for a study that attempted to gauge the nature of creativity. The study featured a threeday barrage of
psychological tests and interviews, including the arrangement of tiles, conformity studies, and protoMeyersBriggs
evaluations. The participants were asked to rank one another's creative prowess before the study; Philip Johnson, A.
Quincy Jones, and Eero Saarinen each ranked themselves first. Interview commentary on Richard Neutra noted that
"he almost literally thinks of himself as superman." Not all were consumed by hubris; many were identified as
nervous and selfeffacing, and almost all were labeled colossal introverts. Serraino notes that the study revealed that it
is "much easier to determine the traits of the creative person than... the creative process." It did identify the subjects'
"fierce escape from the conformism of thought and belief," their tendency to perceive problems that others did not,
and an unfailing quest to not merely solve problems but solve them elegantly. Serraino documents the study's
implementation and results in this highly entertaining look at an unusual event in the history of American architecture.
Color illus. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study." Publishers Weekly, 9 May 2016, p. 61+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883369&it=r&asid=30272af4a3f64622ea6ef9e42bea4ace.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
2/2/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486081976649 2/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883369
2/2/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486081976649 3/5
MODERNISM REDISCOVERED
Carol Cooper
Whole Earth.
(Summer 2001): p57.
COPYRIGHT 2001 New Whole Earth LLC
Full Text:
MODERNISM REDISCOVERED Pierluigi Serraino & Julius Shulman 2000; 576 pages $40 Taschen
With this gorgeous retrospective of public and private buildings built between 1939 and 1980, the thoughtful
publishers at Taschen ask two important questions: Why are some buildings (and their celebrated designers) still
famous, while others have dropped from memory? Could it be the photography?
Since we Viridians want our cybergreen design philosophies to take permanent root in the public consciousness, we
have to share these two concerns.
Consider Julius Shulman's color and black & white shots, originally taken for American Modernism magazine. Here
we see the brilliant yet forgotten architect Gordon Drake constructing affordable, aesthetically optimistic housing in
the wake of WW II; buildings that would fit organically and unobtrusively into their environments, whether those be
mountainous, woodsy, desert, seaside, or some temperate combination thereof.
Feast your eyes on that natural stone, the local hardwoods, panoramic glass walls, interior ponds, Japanese gardens,
strategic use of natural light, and a very Japanese sense of flowthrough in terms of indoor/outdoor living. Yet none of
the works in this book received massive publicity during its heyday. The buildings may have since decayed, yet the
imagery is still here, a helpful reminder of how pervasive this protoViridian aesthetic once was in American
architectural ideology.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Cooper, Carol. "MODERNISM REDISCOVERED." Whole Earth, Summer 2001, p. 57. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA76896188&it=r&asid=a03a1aea12a4616dc264bb00c07b130a.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A76896188
2/2/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486081976649 4/5
Modernism Rediscovered
David Soltesz
Library Journal.
126.4 (Mar. 1, 2001): p83.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Serraino, Pierluigi (text) & Julius Shulman (photogs.). Modernism Rediscovered. Taschen, dist. by Client Distribution
Svcs. 2000. 575p. photogs. bibliog. index. ISBN 3822864153. pap. $39.99. ARCHITECTURE
Shulman, long considered the premiere photographer of mid20thcentury West Coast Modern architecture, is now
hailed as an artist who defined the image of the "good life" for postwar America through his elegant depictions of
spare but luxurious International Style dwellings. The publisher extends the Shulman craze with a mesmerizing
portfolio of rare architectural photos. For this book, Shulman raided his vast archive to cull over 500 photos, many
published only once before, of houses, office buildings, and other structures by talented but lesserknown and
forgotten architects. This treasure trove will captivate architecture historians and midcentury Modern design buffs.
The serviceable but pedantic text by architect Serraino consists of a dispensable introductory essay and a dry running
commentary on each building. Most public libraries should hold either Joseph Rosa's A Constructed View: The
Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman (Rizzoli, 1994) or Shulman's autobiographical Julius Shulman:
Architecture and Its Photography (Taschen, 1998). Modernism Rediscovered is an excellent addition for academic
and specialized architecture collections.
David Soltesz, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Soltesz, David. "Modernism Rediscovered." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2001, p. 83. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA71949794&it=r&asid=c8e16ab31af8e797dc6ab24203f4d24b.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A71949794
2/2/2017 General OneFile Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486081976649 5/5
NorCalMod; icons of northern California
modernist architecture
Reference & Research Book News.
21.4 (Nov. 2006):
COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780811843539
NorCalMod; icons of northern California modernist architecture.
Serraino, Pierluigi.
Chronicle Books
2006
288 pages
$35.00
Hardcover
NA735
The 300 color and blackandwhite photographs in this text provide convincing evidence for Serraino's argument that
modernist architecture flowered in California north of the San Fernando Valley. In addition to presenting examples,
Serraino, an architect and author, describes the modernist movement as it unfolded in the Bay Area, delineating
carefully the debates that surrounded its inception and its eventual decline.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"NorCalMod; icons of northern California modernist architecture." Reference & Research Book News, Nov. 2006.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA153753625&it=r&asid=3313c5f1fd1af43935863daf94afab72.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A153753625
Oculus Book Review: The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study by Pierluigi Serraino
BOOK REVIEWS by ANNIE COGGAN • 10/27
Pierluigi Serraino’s presentation of his fascinating new book, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Mid-Century Personality Study, held at the Center for Architecture on 10.10.16, was a model of clarity and elegance. Serraino is a poised speaker, who deftly explained the intense premise and vetting necessary to orchestrate the 1958 Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) assessment at the University of California Berkley that analyzed 40 contemporary architects in the search for the definition of creativity. His talk and text are based on research compiled by Donald Mackinnon and Wallace Hall, but with his charming delivery it was an evening of data with a dash of gossip about American architecture.
The cultural context of the study is noteworthy. Mackinnon’s previous research was based on effectiveness personality studies conducted in WWII by the Office of Strategic Services. Moderately successful, it was hoped that these studies could potentially get to the essence of creative thinking in the “new American man.” The notion that an effectiveness study could translate into a study of creativity runs throughout the book. According to Serraino, the rush to define and codify creativity was derived from America’s shock that Sputnik got Russia into space before the U.S. Something was missing from the industry-driven American post-war environment, and IPAR was out to find the answer.
The task of compiling the list of architects was choreographed by the Berkeley architecture patriarch William Wurster. The then-dean of the architecture school at Berkley crafted a team of vaguely like-minded younger architects to tabulate who they thought to be the most original contemporary architectural thinkers. The results and the commentary that Serraino had access to is fascinating, illustrating a bend toward the softer side of Modernism – Mies bad – Alto good. The list was also decidedly West Coast-centric. Evidently, corralling 40 of the top-tier architects was time-consuming and frustrating, but as soon as the highly-regarded Eero Saarinen committed to a weekend, others agreed to join the study as well.
The author gives us samplings of the personality interviews of architectural greats such as A. Quincy Jones, Louis Kahn, and Harwell Hamilton. All had tough childhoods marked by some financial strain (potentially typical of Depression-era American childhoods). A highlight of the research is the Mosaic Construction Test, the only tactile exercise in a battery of assessments, which asked the subjects to create compositions with one-inch colored squares. Studying these small compositional exercises is worth buying the book in and of itself. Each small piece holds a compositional idea, although the prompts by the researchers were based on a “what you like” premise, which is the antithesis of a designer’s thinking process.
The text is also illustrated with assessment sheets and intriguing photographic documentation of the interiors of the former Berkeley frat house where the architects were housed during the assessment. The name-brand architects are not in the photos, but researchers serve as stand-ins. The postures and décor seem to hold deep physiological significance, although they are not a highlight of the author’s argument.
The most potent finding of the 1958-1959 portion of the study was that architects self-identified as loners, and much of the data pointed to an inability to stay focused unless the architect in question was leading the group. These findings may have held true for the mid-20th century, but it would be interesting to see if such characteristics would be found in innovative 21st-century architects, particularly women architects. In this day and age, the lone genius is no more; architecture is decidedly a team sport, and women architects direct a more inclusive and community-based industry. This book is a fascinating yet decidedly historic account of an architect’s mind.
Event: Oculus Book Talk: The Creative Architect
Location: Center for Architecture, 10.20.16
Speakers: Pierluigi Serraino, AIA, architect, author, and educator; and Suzanne Stephens, Hon. AIANY, Deputy Editor, Architectural Record
Organized by: AIANY Oculus Committee
August 31, 2016
12
12
BOOKS
Inside the Mind of a Creative Architect
What a long-forgotten psychology study reveals about the giants of midcentury architecture.
By MIMI ZEIGER
A simulation of the Conformity Test, which was used to measure how peer pressure affected the judgment of study participants
Monacelli Press
A simulation of the Conformity Test, which was used to measure how peer pressure affected the judgment of study participants
It’s easy to picture Philip Johnson seated in his regular booth in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons; his back to the windows, his bespectacled eyes on the door, he’s confident and at the top of his game as he presides over a room of his own design.
Now imagine him jittery and hesitant in a different room on a different coast. It’s the late 1950s and, faced with a University of California, Berkeley researcher trying to uncover the secrets to his creativity, Johnson uses his ample verbal and social gifts to upend the interview. In a typed report, the researcher would later write, “He showed many classic features of the manic: self-centered, irritable, jumpy, flight of ideas, arrogance, use of humor to defend against serious consideration of anxiety-producing topics.”
It’s difficult to believe that Johnson would submit to such an uncomfortable interrogation, but he was one of 40 architects who willingly spent a weekend taking tests and filling out questionnaires that delved deep into the personality and processes behind a creative mind. Developed under the auspices of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at UC Berkeley, the study set out to uncover both the psychology and the illusive process of creative acts. Led by Dr. Donald MacKinnon, IPAR’s research grew out of earlier testing of Air Force officers and involved subjects whose professions ranged from free-spirited to problem-solving: writers, scientists, mathematicians. Yet it was the group of architects—some of the finest in postwar America—that best exemplified the convergence of both analytical and artistic skills.
William Wilson Wurster's nominating form for Philip Johnson
Monacelli Press
William Wilson Wurster's nominating form for Philip Johnson
“What are the motivations that make people do what they do?” asks Pierluigi Serraino, a Berkeley-based architect and educator whose book, The Creative Architect (The Monacelli Press, 2016), chronicles the IPAR research. (ARCHITECT did a podcast with the author here.) The study revealed that each of the celebrated architects had something in their backgrounds that they had to overcome: lack of money, repressive parents, or poor health. “To declare in no uncertain terms the core trait of the creative person: The answer is courage,” Serraino writes.
Selecting the Participants
Over four weekends in 1958 and 1959, groups of architects arrived at a large house on Piedmont Avenue just off campus where the testing was conducted. Johnson, Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, Richard Neutra, I.M. Pei, FAIA, and other designers were invited to participate after an elaborate selection process that not only polled panels of architecture academics and editors for their top picks, but also ranked practitioners’ prominence based on media coverage.
Serraino’s book is remarkable in its reproductions of bureaucratic artifacts from the study, including examples of mimeographed questionnaires used to evaluate possible participants. Architect William Wilson Wurster, a member of the nomination evaluation committee, writes of Paul Rudolph, who was then the newly appointed chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale: “Youngish—Mannered—Egotistical—Perhaps thin in real content.” Nominator and California modernist Joseph Esherick praised Johnson’s writing: “He’s a tremendous perfectionist and no matter what hat he happens to be wearing at the moment does everything extremely well.”
Johnson, for his part, initially declined his invitation to participate and used his cutting wit to skewer the study’s premise. “I’m curious, however, as to how you pick a creative architect. Ninety-five percent of them are, of course, businessmen, organizers, salesmen and hucksters.”
During the course of the IPAR weekends, the architects were subjected to numerous verbal tests, each calibrated to measure aspects of the creative personality and process. But there was just one graphic procedure undertaken by the architects: The Mosaic Construction Test, developed by IPAR researcher Frank Barron to measure aesthetic sensibility. Subjects were given 1-inch colored squares in 22 different colors and asked to create a composition. In some notable cases, the results reveal (or rather confirm) what we now recognize as architectural signatures. Johnson, in a proto-postmodern move, channeled Mondrian in red, black, and white; Kahn chose a muted palette of brick-like browns and reds; and Saarinen created a grid of white—and only white—squares. “Saarinen wanted to be different,” explains Serraino. “People who were uncreative would fall back into formulaic patterns. Creatives take the lead.”
Or, as MacKinnon summed it up in his 1964 paper, “The Characteristics of Creative Architects”: “The truly creative person knows who he is, where he wants to go, and what he wants to achieve. In [German psychoanalyst] Erik Erikson’s phrase, the creative person has solved the problem of his own identity.”
IPAR’s conclusion—that the creative personality comes from knowing one’s mind and vision in the face of personal struggle—is reflected by the interview reports. Neutra is described as thinking of himself as a Superman able to solve all problems. The interviewer, however, discerned a palpable fear of abandonment and suggested that the architect’s domineering personality was a coping mechanism. In the case of Raphael Soriano, his report pinpointed his father’s loss of fortune and abusiveness as the drive behind the architect’s need for originality. “In observing these subjects, bombarded with tests in the Berkeley lab, the psychologists learned what theory alone could not confirm,” writes Serraino. “Creative individuals have a very important pattern in common: they consistently safeguard their self-determination in order to stay their course and pursue what interests them no matter what, in a fierce escape from conformism of thought and behavior.”
Responses to the Mosaic Construction Test
Responses to the Mosaic Construction Test
A Homogeneous Sample
MacKinnon published IPAR’s research, along with examples of mosaic tests, in national magazines such as Architectural Record and Scientific American. Serraino writes that the experiment findings influenced the nascent technology industry in nearby Silicon Valley, and eventually entered mainstream culture though lectures and radio shows, which goes a long way in explaining why the results sound so familiar. Today, the individualistic signifiers of creativity populate everything from advertising to app development, from bespoke fashion to the share economy. There are meditation workshops to unleash creativity, books on design thinking, and businesses of all kinds that value anything that will produce “out of the box” ideas. “A key recurring word is ‘innovation,’ ” says Serraino of IPAR’s reports, “but now it’s tainted with commerce.”
Louis Kahn's Mosaic Construction Test
Monacelli Press
Louis Kahn's Mosaic Construction Test
In hindsight, perhaps the most glaring thing about the IPAR study is the homogeneity of the participants. True to the demographics of the postwar profession, all were male, and most were white and middle-aged. At 36, Sarasota School architect Victor Lundy was the youngest and, at 67, legendary modernist Richard Neutra was the oldest. Notably, nearly all were sole practitioners with their name on the door.
One can’t help but wonder if these men truly embodied creativity or if the narrowness of the sample produced an equally narrow narrative of creative personality, which poses a false model for the pluralisms of the 21st century. Consider Bjarke Ingels. He certainly epitomizes the creative persona sketched out by MacKinnon. But his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group, tries for a more international, multidisciplinary, multigenerational, and collaborative approach than the standard midcentury architecture office. “For an architect, [creativity] means attempting to create the physical framework that allows us to live the way we want to live—rather than being forced into lifestyles imposed upon us by our societal structures or physical environment,” Ingels says. “I love the definition of complexity in computer programming: Complexity is defined as the capacity to communicate the maximum amount of information with the minimum amount of data. In other words, to express more with less. This is what we strive for: to facilitate the maximum freedom of human expression with the least possible means.”
Architecture editors—and the architects themselves—ranked the study participants in order of creativity; Saarinen topped both lists.
Monacelli Press
Architecture editors—and the architects themselves—ranked the study participants in order of creativity; Saarinen topped both lists.
Ann Lui, the founder with Craig Reschke, AIA, of the Chicago-based practice Future Firm, recalls something Denise Scott Brown, Hon. FAIA, wrote in a 1981 article in the Journal for Architectural Education. “The path of rationality will take us far, but not all the way,” the architect wrote. “We come at last to a gap. The implications of creativity—the need to ‘jump’—cannot be avoided.” It was that illusive jump that IPAR had hoped to explain.
There’s a reminder here of the tumultuous decade between 1959, the year of the study, and 1969, the year Scott Brown joined Venturi and Rauch—a decade in which the notions of identity, diversity, and collaboration were rapidly expanding. “Creativity is about constructing meaning within an ever-shifting cultural landscape,” says Barbara Bestor, AIA, of Bestor Architects. “It is a way of communicating and imagining new ways of being in the world.”
Both Bestor and Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manferdini define creativity not as an expression of difference, per se, but rather as an act connected to outside factors. “Artists are individuals that belong to their time,” Manferdini says. “Their unique ability is their sensibility to absorb contemporary culture and, in the case of architects, formalize it as built environment. Architects, even when working on personal projects, end up bringing to reality the latent collective visions of our time.”
School grades reported by test participants
Monacelli Press
School grades reported by test participants
The Ethics Problem
The IPAR testing weekends in Berkeley were not all questionnaires and Rorschach tests. Group discussions were conducted in a kind of cocktail party format, where tricky topics were put to each group of gathered architects. Indeed, Serraino uncovered a 35-minute recording of Johnson, Saarinen, Lundy, Gregory Ain, and Ernest Born tackling an “Ethics Problem.” They were asked respond to a scenario where client imposed a do-or-die change to an important commission. The question: Do you keep the project and make the changes that undermine the vision of your design? Or do you walk away?
The IPAR study used the test to identify personality traits around ego and professional expertise. But today, the subject of ethics resonates beyond just the realization of a perfect architectural vision, and has expanded to include human rights at home and abroad, as well as architecture and urban design’s role in responding to homelessness and systemic discrimination. Peter Zellner of Zellner Naecker Architects suggests that it’s no longer possible to treat architecture as solely an aesthetic pursuit. “I define architectural creativity as a social and political act, not exclusively an artistic and personal activity,” he says.
In Berkeley, after a couple of martinis and a lively round of debate about the “Ethics Problem,” Saarinen said he’d walk off the project, thus preserving his professional design integrity, since a building lasts longer than any individual. Johnson balked at the verity of the question. “It doesn’t happen that way in architecture,” he replied. And, with a nod to the very clichéd description of the heroic architect we hold today, accused Saarinen of reading too much Ayn Rand.
I.M. Pei's Mosaic Construction Test
I.M. Pei's Mosaic Construction Test
How do you define creativity? We asked leading architects today. Here are their responses:
Eric Höweler, co-founder of Höweler+Yoon
"Creativity is a something that is so deeply ingrained in architecture that it is presupposed. Is there such a thing as a non-creative architecture? Maybe not.
"On the other hand, creativity may be a kind of fetishized quality, like originality, mastery, and genius. In the mythologizing of creativity we have tended to treat it like a scarce natural resource. There is either oil, or there is no oil. You either have it or you don’t. Or, you just have to wait until creativity strikes, like a freak weather event.
"Creative work is actually much more active, requiring both preparation and action. Ideas rarely emerge fully formed, but often require some ritual coaxing. Doing, testing, re-doing. Like a rain dance, creativity is an iterative process to make the lighting strike."
Philip Johnson's Mosaic Construction Test
Monacelli Press
Philip Johnson's Mosaic Construction Test
Elena Manferdini, principal of Atelier Manferdini
"Creation is often associated with the religious act of a superior individual that from nothing makes something. Creativity is not something that one owns or a concept that exists in a vacuum. Creativity belongs to the medium of each art, its traditions, its technical abilities, its battles, and its references; and, in the case of architecture, its industry. Creativity is a sensibility to culture and contemporaneity, and it is a quintessential technical problem!
"Creativity is part of expressing our humanity and finding meaning in our existence. Although one can try to hide it, it always finds its way out in the world. And so it does in my practice. Sometimes I wonder if creativity is something I should try to contain more, but it turns out that it is a lost battle."
Bjarke Ingels, principal of BIG
"Creativity is the capacity to channel life in to the world. To order and organize matter in new combinations and compositions in such ways that it opens up possibilities for the unfolding of life that would otherwise not have been possible.
"I think our office at BIG is quite close to my ideal creative environment: lots of resources (the more trash you generate in the design process, the less you end up building in the real world); lots of tools and technology (we seek knowledge and skill wherever we can find it—in media, in tools, materials, technologies—the question is never 'technology or not' but always which tools to deploy for what purpose); lots of intelligence (it is always fun to work with brilliant people); lots of perspectives (having accumulated architects and thinkers from more than 25 different nationalities spanning four generations we have a lot of different angles on each problem or potential we encounter); and finally, no fear (sometimes the most stupid question or the lamest idea is the seed that triggers the final breakthrough—if it is never asked or proposed it will never occur—so the first barrier to overcome is your own prejudice).
"People who through their work or expression expand my perception of the world. Be it a painter or photographer that captures parts of the world (light, situations, conditions, colors), or a writer who identifies aspects of human life or society that I was otherwise unaware of, once my perception has been alerted to these conditions I won't be able to forget them, even after I am done contemplating the artwork or reading the book. The same counts for science, music, philosophy, architecture. Once my attention has been alerted and the idea has been planted, it becomes part of me, my worldview and my future engagement with the world. The list is endless but Charles Darwin, Douglas Coupland, Friedrich Nietsche, Christopher Nolan, and Ray Kurzweil have been significant influences."
Richard Neutra's Mosaic Construction Test
Monacelli Press
Richard Neutra's Mosaic Construction Test
Barbara Bestor, AIA, principal of Bestor Architecture
"Architecture is a creative practice in that when we design, we are never only problem solving—there is a load of cultural tradition and associations behind architecture whatever the typology and budget range. One of the fun things about being an architect is that you get to be creative in ever-changing situations—sometimes you are almost in a Houdini-like straightjacket of budget and time, but those constraints can make it even more fun and challenging to come up with a successful project.
"I’m interested in pushing along expectations of what our built environment looks and feels like in American cities. I like to make work that is unexpected and brings joy to daily life. I think our creative approach to mundane questions: daily living, food service, multifamily housing, has allowed us to work at very different scales and typology, and this gives the office a lot of energy and agility."
Peter Zellner, Assoc. AIA, co-founder of Zellner Naecker Architects
"Sometimes architecture is a creative practice. That said, I would offer that it is neither a pure art, like painting, or one of the new forms of creative work aligned with so-called tech innovation, such as web or app design. If art still seems more free to promote a radically personal or political voice, and other new forms of 'creative' work rarely develop beyond existing exclusively for fast promotional output, I would define the value of architectural creativity according to the degree to which a creative idea can be productively applied, in part or in whole, to a social and/or an environmental problem. Absent any dynamic real world effect, whether in the short or long term, I would argue that creative architectural action ultimately fails.
"Creativity in our practice is tied to strategies that have a set urban goal that are, hopefully, implemented at the scale of unique and uncanny architectural incidents."
Michel Rojkind, founder of Rojkind Arquitectos
"It starts with an energetic interrelation to the world, how we perceive that energy and its physical forms, and with a specific outcome that once was an idea. Of course, and even more so in these modern times, we have to be creative enough to design a business strategy that enriches and defines a better outcome: What I call projects with 'added value,' or going beyond the original program.
"We are fueled by curiosity and are always looking for a shared responsibility between our client, users, the municipality, the neighborhood. But [creativity] starts with us raising questions: Can we reprogram the program to have a better outcome? Can we make the client aware of the opportunity to give something back to society? Can we help negotiate between all the people involved to have more meaningful results and create better cities?"
Ann Lui, founding partner of Future Firm
"When you are operating within complex frameworks of building code, budgets, historical context, public and private requirements, as well as you and your office’s own agendas, hopes, debts, promises, it ends up that landing on even one solution seems like a magical stroke of luck. In contrast, 'creativity' sounds like the freewheeling ability to conjure many possible options. Still, there is always that moment, 'the jump,' when you turn off your brain and try to put something on the page before re-evaluating it. So in the end, I guess I believe architecture is a creative practice."
The Creative Architect: Inside Psychology’s Most Ambitious and Influential Study of What Makes a Creative Person
“The creative person has the courage to experience opposites of his nature and to attempt some reconciliation of them in an individuated expression of himself.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
The Creative Architect: Inside Psychology’s Most Ambitious and Influential Study of What Makes a Creative Person
“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating,” John Cleese proclaimed in his widely beloved 1991 lecture on the five factors of creativity. What may seem like the clever packaging of a commonplace truism today was once a radical proposition, the seed for which was planted just three decades before Cleese’s proclamation. Although this “way of operating” — the constellation of intuitions, cognitive patterns, and habits of mind which we call “creativity” — is responsible for every human civilization that has ever existed, it is only in the last blink of evolutionary history that we have turned an inquisitive eye toward what creativity actually is and how it can be cultivated.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, creativity was considered a nebulous and hokey subject unfit for scientific study. It may be a rather curious system bug of our consciousness that we so easily dismiss the most elemental and highest-order objects of human aspiration as somehow unserious and unworthy of rigorous research — Harvard’s pioneering study of happiness, which began in 1938, had to upend enormous cultural and academic norms, as did the first systematic study of love in 1958.
The turning point for creativity came in 1959, thanks to a researcher by the name of Dr. Donald MacKinnon, director of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at UC Berkeley.
IPAR researchers in the staff kitchen, c. 1961
IPAR researchers in the staff kitchen, c. 1961
Just as trailblazing Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner was revolutionizing the study of creativity on the East Coast, his West Coast counterpart was undertaking a study of unprecedented size and range at IPAR — a rigorous inquiry into what makes a person “creative,” what motivates such people’s work, how they are able to overcome self-doubt, what environmental conditions are most conducive to manifesting creativity, and whether it is possible to identify the creatively gifted before their talents bear tangible fruit.
The subjects of IPAR’s most landmark study were forty of the era’s greatest architects, including Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and I.M. Pei. Subsequent studies over the course of three decades focused on other groups of high achievement — Air Force officers, women mathematicians, research scientists, and managers. Their insights, which laid the foundation for contemporary research into the psychology of creativity, have been cited in innumerable publications for decades, but the original findings have remained buried in university archives for more than half a century — until now.
Pierluigi Serraino tells the story of IPAR’s revolutionary endeavor and its lasting legacy in The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study (public library). He writes:
IPAR was determined to take the alchemy out of any conversation on creativity and use fieldwork to corroborate their hypothesis that creativity was the result of a set of conditions, external and internal to individuals, without any teleological explanation of its origins. Adopting a solid research angle and studying creativity through a direct examination of the individuals hailed as leaders in their fields was of the essence to circumvent the precariousness and unreliability of the countless opinions that pseudo-experts were circulating on the topic.
Cover of the 1962 “Man’s Creative Mind" issue of IBM’s THINK magazine, with cover art by Harry Bertoia
Cover of the 1962 “Man’s Creative Mind” issue of IBM’s THINK magazine, with cover art by Harry Bertoia
More than that, IPAR’s research, with its focus on creativity as a profoundly human and humane faculty, became a counterpoint to the era’s growing fear of mechanization. Serraino explains:
At the core of the effective functioning of the IPAR research unit was a fundamental position shared by MacKinnon and his colleagues: that creativity conformed to certain rules and that its patterns of appearance could be objectively measured and explained. But even more importantly, all those involved in the study — researchers, sponsoring agencies, the subjects themselves — held the mental process of the individual to be the center of the creative processes, dispelling all the rhetoric associated with genius.
[…]
As alarming visions of an Orwellian society dominated by automated technologies were going viral in postwar Western civilization, the investigation on creativity was seen as a crucial tool in the race for humanity’s very survival, saving it form an obliteration of its own making by solving problems such as the population boom, the anxiety of a nuclear annihilation, and the intelligent use of technology in civic life.
IPAR researcher Ravenna Helson at her desk, c. 1960
IPAR researcher Ravenna Helson at her desk, c. 1960
Due to the demands of postwar society, IPAR’s initial focus wasn’t on creativity but on effectiveness. Serraino quotes original IPAR researcher Ravenna Helson, the only surviving team member at the time of his writing:
One could be effective — meet one’s goals, such as running a tight ship, making a lot of money, getting a PhD in a short time — without the goals involving creativity.
In 1953, IPAR’s focus began to shift toward creativity, commencing their trailblazing studies of writers and architects, which were unlike anything that had been done before in psychology. Serraino reports on their process:
A staff of psychologists would observe and test the creative people during “live-in” assessments at the Institute’s lab, a three-day block of intensive testing on-site, so as to extract for the first time a veritable picture of their inner drives and of the external circumstances supporting their creative expression. A new element in the IPAR approach was the study of group dynamics, undertaken by observation of subjects in a social context. Assorted into groups of varying sizes according to the nature of the experiment at hand, subjects and researchers were to discuss pre-established questions, resulting in formal and informal exchanges that opened new paths to unique data retrieval.
The researchers identified four key areas of interest — “the creative person, the creative process, the creative product, and the creative situation.” Serraino writes of the first one:
Certain hypotheses had already formed: for instance, that creative people have an above-average capacity to retrieve information from their pasts and exhibit a marked absence of repression of their own impulses. Their findings, thus far, led IPAR to surmise that “the greater expressiveness of the creative person contributes also to a greater independence of thought and action.” At this early stage, they had already detected a correlation between intelligence and self-assertiveness as predictors of autonomous thought and performance. Furthermore, [the researchers] saw a stable link between complex visual and conceptual capacity and originality in creative people. Psychodynamic complexity, greater personal scope, independence of judgment, self-assertiveness, social dominance, and the suppression of impulse control were firm points in the growing understanding of the emotional universe within the creative person.
Alongside the four dimensions of creativity the scientists identified three types of creative people: Those whose creative work embodied Ann Truitt’s assertion that “artists have no choice but to express their lives” — novelists, poets, and playwrights fell within that category; those whose work aimed at objective goals drawing on an external reality — this class included physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers; and those whose work was a combination of the other two, partway between subjective self-expression and objective, testable inquiry — architects and music arrangers were placed in that group.
The researchers found a number of intriguing patterns and correlations: In the arts, creative work seemed to arise from psychic restlessness and resolve some internal conflict, whereas in the sciences it seemed to express what Serraino terms “personal cosmologies of external reality.” The notable common denominator was that across all fields, creative breakthroughs required a solid foundation of preexisting expert knowledge — a testament to Pasteur’s famous tenet of ideation, “chance favors the prepared mind.
Cover of the Saturday Review, February 10, 1962, featuring Donald MacKinnon’s article “What Makes a Person Creative?”
Cover of the Saturday Review, February 10, 1962, featuring Donald MacKinnon’s article “What Makes a Person Creative?”
Of all the different types in the study, MacKinnon was most intrigued by and invested in the architects — a profession that tempers the creative wildness of the artist with the testable prototyping of the scientist and the savvy of the entrepreneur. He identified 64 high achievers in architecture — alarmingly but unsurprisingly, given the era, all male and almost entirely white — and invited them to what he promised would be a landmark study of creativity and the qualities of successful people. Astonishingly, forty of them — including some of the most renowned architects of the time — agreed to participate. They became Group I and were joined by another 84 lesser-accomplished architects subdivided into two more groups, for a total of 124 participants.
But as rigorous a psychologist as MacKinnon was, he lacked the expertise needed for identifying what constitutes creativity in architecture. So he enlisted the help of architecturally adroit collaborators like Elizabeth Kendall Thompson, a powerful tastemaker and West Coast editor of Architectural Record. With their help, MacKinnon designed a sophisticated study, which was to be conducted over the course of a weekend — an impressive time investment for participants of this caliber, but many of the architects were lured by the opportunity to mingle with their peers and competitors. The researchers proceeded to study such dimensions of creativity and character as thinking and feeling, introversion and extroversion, individualism and collaboration, self-awareness, childhood conditions, and much more, enlisting existing tests like the Myers-Briggs alongside their own original questionnaires.
Eero Saarinen's Architectural Aptitude Test
Eero Saarinen’s Architectural Aptitude Test
MacKinnon echoed Virginia Woolf’s assertion that the most creative mind is the androgynous mind in summarizing the most crucial findings:
The evidence is clear: the more creative a person is the more he reveals an openness to his own feelings and emotions, a sensitive intellect and understanding, self-awareness, and wide-ranging interests, including many which in the American culture are thought to be feminine.
One of the subtler, most paradoxical, yet most important findings had to do with the role of parenting in the development of the creative person. Serraino writes:
Many subjects indicated that as children they had enjoyed a marked degree of autonomy from their parents. They were entrusted with independent judgment and allowed to develop curiosity at their own pace without overt supervision or interference. MacKinnon noted of these parents, “They did not hesitate to grant him rather unusual freedom in exploring his universe and in making decisions for himself — and this early as well as late. The expectation of the parent that the child would act independently but reasonably and responsibly appears to have contributed immensely to the latter’s sense of personal autonomy which was to develop to such a marked degree.”
But this autonomy had a darker side — it coexisted with a certain emotional detachment from one or both parents. Serraino writes:
The offspring often reported a sense of remoteness, a distance from their elders, which ultimately helped them avoid, the scientists argued, the overdependence — or momentous rejection — that often characterizes parent-child relationships, both of which were believed to interfere with the unencumbered unfolding of the self through the creative process.
Despite this sense of disconnectedness, one parent — typically the mother — played a significant role in emboldening the child’s creative exploits during his formative years. While the fathers modeled work ethic, the mothers of the most creative architects — and the layered cultural significance of this finding couldn’t be emphasized more — displayed an uncommon degree of independence from their husbands and led highly engaged lives animated by professional, intellectual, and creative interests of their own.
Philip Johnson's Architectural Aptitude Test
Philip Johnson’s Architectural Aptitude Test
Another crucial factor in the development of the creative person was the influence of a teacher or mentor in their formative years — something the impact of which Albert Camus articulated in a touching letter of gratitude to his boyhood teacher days after he received the Nobel Prize. Serraino writes of this influential figure:
This person is a portal into the challenging and intense joy of practicing an art. The vocation of architecture requires a combination of skill, competence, knowledge, devotion, and enthusiasm, traits that together launch these individuals on a life-long mission to excel and enjoy the fruit of their commitment to a meaningful activity offering them a way to demonstrate their capabilities and self-worth to themselves first and foremost.
But perhaps the most important finding, as well as the one most difficult to swallow as we face a culture which increasingly demands of us to fragment ourselves along identity variables, had to do with the elusive art of inner wholeness, conveyed in MacKinnon’s own poignant words:
Most persons live a sort of half-life, giving expression to only a very limited part of themselves and realizing only a few of their many potentialities. The creative person has the courage to experience opposites of his nature and to attempt some reconciliation of them in an individuated expression of himself.
Half a century later, Mary Oliver would articulate the same sentiment in her piercing observation that “the most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
In the remainder of The Creative Architect, Serraino delves into the finer details of the study, down to the original handwritten questionnaires, to reveal the inner workings of the creative mind and the equally fascinating meta-creativity of designing and implementing this enormously inventive, daring, influential, and still unparalleled study. Complement it with physicist David Bohm on the nature of creativity and pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner on its six pillars, then hear Serraino’s Design Matters interview about the backstory of his ambitious project:
Design for Living
Eero Saarinen opened up to researchers about his father. They concluded Philip Johnson was ‘like a controlled psychotic.’
A design, inspired by Mondrian, that Philip Johnson created in the 1959 U.C. Berkeley study of creativity
A design, inspired by Mondrian, that Philip Johnson created in the 1959 U.C. Berkeley study of creativity PHOTO: MONACELLI PRESS
By CHRISTINE CIPRIANI
Aug. 5, 2016 5:21 p.m. ET
3 COMMENTS
Who becomes an architect, and why? In 1958 and ’59, a group of psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, embarked on a pathbreaking quest to find out. They flew 40 of the nation’s most celebrated architects into town, put them up at the Claremont Hotel and shuttled them to a former fraternity house, where they underwent three days of assessment and took lunch, dinner and cocktails together—all under psychological surveillance.
Among the remarkable number of titans who made the trip were Pietro Belluschi, John Johansen, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, George Nelson, Richard Neutra, I.M. Pei and Eero Saarinen. Some grumbled about the futility of the exercise, but all sat gamely for extended interviews and an exhausting battery of tests on perception, cognition, conformity and so on. The goal, writes San Francisco architect Pierluigi Serraino in “The Creative Architect,” was to understand “the peculiar personality profile [of] those committed to making an imprint on the world through physical changes to the built environment.”
THE CREATIVE ARCHITECT
By Pierluigi Serraino
Monacelli, 248 pages, $45
Probing each man’s childhood, education and professional life, the interviews resulted in priceless psychological profiles, 10 of which are reproduced in Mr. Serraino’s engrossing book. These can be raw. Raphael Soriano, his assessor wrote, “seeks out punishment,” having been “beaten by his father while tied to a couch.” Philip Johnson “seems like a controlled psychotic.” Saarinen, reviewing his complicated relationship with his eminent architect father, Eliel, claimed he would not have become an architect at all had he not grown up in Finland, where, he said, “it is normal to follow your father in his occupation.”
Other primary documents thicken the stew, including the architects’ colorful designs for something called the Mosaic Construction Test; drawings they concocted from two short printed lines; select questionnaires and letters; and fragments of recorded group sessions, in which they were given a problem to discuss. “I am the kind of architect that people come to because I am going to give them what I do, not what they want,” said Serge Chermayeff in a roundtable on whether to drop a thorny client.
Mr. Serraino lingers on the design of the study, particularly the selection of subjects by an advisory group of architecture professors and magazine editors. This process now reads like a party game, a relentlessly rigorous yet naturally subjective debate over which of the nation’s most accomplished architects were also the most creative. Later, when the assessments were complete and the architects had gone home, each of them, in turn, was sent a list of the participants and asked to rank them from the most to the least creative. Many of the results appear in the book and alone are worth the price of admission. Only seven architects ranked themselves No. 1; winners of the most first-place votes from their peers were Saarinen, Neutra and Kahn.
All this is candy for architecture buffs, but Mr. Serraino is also concerned with the forgotten importance of the study, which, researcher Frank Barron wrote 40 years later, “remains unique in the history of psychology.”
The Institute of Personality Assessment and Research was founded in 1949 by Donald MacKinnon and colleagues at Berkeley. Within a few years, IPAR had developed several influential personality tests and carried out studies aimed at identifying the “highly effective individual.” Some of these were funded by the Defense Department, and all were lubricated by the wartime experience of MacKinnon and others in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA.
In the mid-1950s, following the zeitgeist and new work on “divergent thinking” by J.P. Guilford at the University of Southern California, the institute shifted its focus to creativity. “As alarming visions of an Orwellian society dominated by automated technologies were going viral in postwar Western civilization,” Mr. Serraino writes, “the investigation on creativity was seen as a crucial tool in the race for humanity’s very survival, saving it from an obliteration of its own making.” This work became MacKinnon’s passion, driven in part by his aversion to “the tragedy of talent wasted because it is unrecognized.”
Because creativity was understood as ineffable, it was stuck academically in the realm of “metaphysics,” Mr. Serraino writes. Determined to bolster its place in scientific discourse, IPAR set some terms: “What makes a person creative? What are their motivations and drives? What are the environmental conditions and personality traits required to actualize creativity?” The team devised a study of outstanding professionals in four fields: literature, architecture, mathematics and physical science. The group that captured the imagination of the popular press and MacKinnon himself was the architects, whose work was seen as a tantalizing node between science and art.
Data from all four professions were repeatedly analyzed. While the researchers’ methods would not quite meet today’s standards, their conclusions were consistent across every field: Creative people do have certain traits and habits in common. Subjects were “profoundly independent” thinkers, Mr. Serraino reports, but expressed this mainly in their work, not in “rebellion for its own sake.” Solutions they pursued were often “in conflict with the status quo of knowledge and culture,” and they placed on themselves “the further demand that the solution be elegant.” For most, work was life, even if personal relationships suffered. Creative growth was fueled by “psychiatric turbulence, a healthy form of restlessness.” As children, most had substantial autonomy from their parents—sometimes to the point of “emotional detachment”—and active, independent mothers.
MacKinnon emphasized that intelligence did not correlate with creative output. The creative person, Mr. Serraino explains, “is often an unsatisfactory student who, bored by the conventions of education, prioritizes personal interests.” Perhaps most notable, for readers in this age of the open bullpen office, MacKinnon affirmed that creative people need to be left alone.
Architecture has always been a collaborative business and was famously reimagined as such by Bauhuas founder and Harvard professor Walter Gropius. But “MacKinnon’s argument was at odds with Gropius’s,” Mr. Serraino writes, as the top architects “were revealed to be quintessentially individualistic and recalcitrant team players. In group contexts, they were prone to lose interest in the task at hand and thus underperform—unless they were leading the group.”
While the book’s clever design recalls a Cold War white paper, the text is rough editorially. Chapter Two, on subject selection, is a chronological jumble; typos are countless; and the text of a frontispiece letter is awkwardly repeated on the opening page. Yet Mr. Serraino has done a great service in excavating this episode. A follow-up, off-site study in the 1980s drew overwhelming participation from the surviving architects, a testament to their lifelong interest in their own motivations. What finally makes “The Creative Architect” so compelling is the fact that so many of these gifted introverts traveled to Berkeley in the first place, hungry to meet their peers and curious, in a larger sense, about who they were and what in the world they were doing. “Very interesting,” wrote Saarinen in his evaluation of the weekend. “Wonderful for the ego!”
—Ms. Cipriani, co-author of “Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape,” is writing a biography of Ada Louise Huxtable.
Long-lost study looks at creativity of architects
By John King, San Francisco ChronicleAugust 17, 2016 Updated: August 18, 2016 12:14pm
1
"The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study," Photo: Institute Of Personality And Social Research, UC Berkeley, And Monacelli Press
Photo: Institute Of Personality And Social Research, UC Berkeley, And Monacelli Press
IMAGE 1 OF 5
"The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study,"
One of architecture’s virtues is that it allows us to look at buildings and see the sensibilities of an era — the cultural values and blind spots, as well as the fundamental traits that never go out of style.
Turns out the same can be said for architects.
If you don’t believe me, then take a plunge into “The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study,” published this summer by Monacelli Press. It’s the thoroughly captivating dissection of four weekends in 1958 and 1959 when 40 prominent architects socialized with their peers while being observed by UC Berkeley researchers.
Voyeurism in the name of scientific analysis, the study in some ways is a relic of a long-gone world. But the revealed mix of egos and insecurity is as familiar as can be, along with an architectural mentality that helps explain why some very good buildings can be very poor neighbors — now as well as then.
The Doty House on Russian Hill, designed by the firm Anshen & Allen, whose leaders were among the the noted American architects invited to take part in a personality study at UC-Berkeley in the late 1950s. Photo: George Knight Photo: George Knight The Doty House on Russian Hill, designed by the firm Anshen & Allen, whose leaders were among the the noted American architects invited to take part in a personality study at UC-Berkeley in the late 1950s.
The author is Pierluigi Serraino, a Bay Area architect who learned of the study in a chance encounter with the son of one of the subjects, legendary Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra. Eventually, he was granted access to the study archives at Cal’s Institute of Personality and Social Research, a treasure trove that held everything from word association tests and the participants’ ranking of their peers to researchers’ notes from the two-hour interviews conducted with each architect.
No surprise, the unearthed data is catnip to anyone intrigued by midcentury buildings — or for that matter, by an unfiltered glimpse of professional America at the dawn of “Mad Men.”
One architect speaks of regular beatings by his father and how “most professors disliked me.” Philip Johnson, who later designed San Francisco’s 101 California St., needles rival Eero Saarinen in an ethics discussion with the comment “It sounds very much like you have been reading Ayn Rand!” Louis Kahn — today the most revered architect of the Berkeley 40 — grandly informs his interviewer that “I have refused thousands of dollars that were tainted by brick or the suggestion of it.”
There’s also a kick in how the attendance list came to be: Invitations went out to 64 practitioners recommended by five College of Environmental Design professors, including William Wurster, the college’s dean. The winnowing process was sniffish. Even though Johnson was invited, for instance, Wurster wrote that he “completely disregards human beings.” The verdict offered by Donald Olsen, another architect-professor, was a masterpiece of faint praise: “Interested in the perfection of certain limited aims.”
Pull back from the tidbits to the total scene and what’s revealed has less to do with architecture than the reality of America in the years after World War II: White males called the shots and took their status for granted.
The 13 researchers for the study included two women, but the Institute’s leadership was all men — several of whom had spent the war with the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. There were no women on the list of 64 invited architects. Of the 40 who attended, I.M. Pei and Worley Wong were the only two of Asian descent.
Or consider the study itself, the idea that something as elusive as creativity could be defined and analyzed. Following which, society could be recalibrated in such as way to spot youth with innate creativity and groom them for productive lives. That’s how it was in the aftermath of World War II and the supposed dawn of what Time publisher Henry Luce dubbed the American Century: Every problem could be solved, whether military threats or urban “blight.”
Too bad the solutions often looked better on paper than in real life, which is one reason urban renewal programs left scars that in many cases still haven’t been healed. Or that the initiator of the study, in Serraino’s succinct words, “eventually acknowledged that the creative process was much harder to investigate than the personality.”
More than merely 'regional' / Author seeks to give the Bay Area's modern architects their rightful place in the movement's pantheon
Joanne Furio, Special to The Chronicle Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Dave Brubeck House, Oakland, 1954, by architect Beverley Thorne, page 156. Credit: From Nor Cal Modern Photo: From Nor Cal Modern
Photo: From Nor Cal Modern
IMAGE 1 OF 2 Dave Brubeck House, Oakland, 1954, by architect Beverley Thorne, page 156. Credit: From Nor Cal Modern
Like an architectural Peeping Tom, Pierluigi Serraino was trying to glimpse Donald Olsen's Metz House in Point Richmond one recent weekday morning. To view the 1957 home Serraino described as "very beautiful," he had to peer through a slit in a wooden gate.
"There is this wonderful frame," he said, "and a gap between the floor and the actual house. The forms are reminiscent of something that Marcel Breuer would do in the houses he did back East."
In researching his fourth book, "NorCalMod" (Chronicle Books, $35), Serraino became an expert at parting the palm fronds and looking past the ubiquitous Spanish Colonials, Craftsmen and Tudors in search of a modernism that thrived in the Bay Area during the middle of the 20th century. The movement, he contends, produced buildings on a par with Southern California's, though the stereotype is that modernist architecture never flowered north of the San Fernando Valley.
"NorCalMod" seeks to correct what Serraino considers "this oversight in architectural history." Serraino, who studied architecture in Rome and Los Angeles and now practices in the Bay Area, spent four years researching the book. (Chronicle Books is not affiliated with The Chronicle.) He interviewed NorCal's surviving modernist architects of the postwar period, as well as critics, and combed through photography archives. The book chronicles 101 midcentury modernist projects in the region, of which 73 are residential.
During the mid-1940s, California was considered "the epicenter of unrestrained modernist experimentation," Serraino writes. Northern California was included in that designation until 1947, according to Serraino, when the influential critic Lewis Mumford coined the term Bay Region Style to describe an unpretentious regionalism sensitive to the site and respectful of its agricultural roots. That label created the NorCal-SoCal divide. "The camps were irreconcilable," Serraino explained. "You were either/or."
Such stereotyping resulted in a lack of coverage of Bay Area modernists in the print media of the time, and, subsequently, in the architectural compilations that create a more lasting legacy. Serraino cites, for example, David Gebhard's "Guide to Architecture in San Francisco and Northern California," which omits the work of Beverley "David" Thorne, who built dozens of influential steel-frame homes. Only one citation by Mario Corbett appears in the guide, though he designed more than 125 residences here.
One reason for the omission is that regional modernist architects of the postwar period "never organized themselves publicly," said Serraino. "Many of them were lousy marketers. Many believed that great buildings speak for themselves." Such a belief resulted in the omission of "a lot of wonderful work" from the print media of the day. Those who hired architectural photographers and mastered the publicity machine often did receive recognition.
Great examples of modernist architecture in the Bay Area still exist today, Serraino said, from the Clinite House in San Mateo (1965) to Hall House in Kentfield (1947) and the Doty Home in San Francisco (1957). Serraino singled out the East Bay one recent morning because it is convenient to his Alameda home.
Of the six houses Serraino toured, the 1954 Oakland home Thorne designed for the jazz composer Dave Brubeck remains one of the region's most important midcentury works.
Situated on a lot measuring a mere 50 by 100 feet, the house sought to fulfill the request of Brubeck's wife to have a so-called "flat plan" -- quite a challenge for such a steep lot. Thorne's solution was to go vertical, tucking a carport under a deck, before going horizontal with a modernist ranch on top. The home daringly cantilevers over the wooded terrain, supported by an interlay of exposed steel beams, a Thorne trademark.
"The key thing is its slenderness and that the cantilever becomes the facade of the house," Serraino observed at curbside. "This house demonstrated a positive association between technology and family and a provider of culture. In a way, this house was a symbol of modernist architecture in which everything can happen."
The house was the second for Thorne, a native of Alameda, who earned his architecture degree from UC Berkeley. Thorne would go on to design Case Study House No. 26 in San Rafael in 1963, as part of Art & Architecture magazine's experimental building program.
The Brubeck house also represents one of the great ironies of publicity: Its 10 years of media exposure did not immediately translate into a more permanent recognition. "For the longest time it was a great unknown in history books," Serraino said.
In the Berkeley hills, Serraino considers the Weston Havens house, the 1941 work of designer Harwell Hamilton Harris, "an absolute masterpiece of 20th century architecture." In this house, Harris expressed the architecture through its structure: three inverted trusses that create three vertical layers, between which are two floors. Harris, a Southern California native, used wood instead of steel "to express a certain slenderness that is somewhat evocative of Wright without being derivative of Wright."
Havens died in 2001, donating the building to Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, which now uses the building for visiting faculty. Though well-known today, the home did not immediately receive attention because it was completed right before Pearl Harbor.
Also in the Berkeley hills is a "little modernist enclave": two houses designed by Donald Olsen, who studied with Walter Gropius while getting his master's in architecture at Harvard. Olsen opened his Bay Area practice in 1954. The influence of Gropius is apparent in both houses, which are boxlike and white, with large expanses of glass.
The 1952 Kip House has "all the right references of a Gropius house," including a small balcony protruding from the facade. Olsen built his own house next door two years later. The home boasts a balcony with cables, a theme he repeats in a 1957 house in Kensington he created for a sheet metal worker Gottlieb Taves.
Serraino came up with the idea for "NorCalMod" after meeting Elaine Jones, the widow of architect Quincy Jones, in connection with his first book, "Modernism Rediscovered" (Taschen, 2000). The book compiles lesser-known, unknown and sometimes never published work of the renowned architectural photographer Julius Shulman.
"She told me that the Bay Area was a hotbed of modernist architecture in the '50s," Serraino recalled. "I could not believe it. Like most of us, I was familiar with (Bernard) Maybeck and regionalism, but not the real history, which also included modernism."
Part of modernism's demise during the 1960s was due to fears that modern urban planning would erase the character of historic cities and mar the natural landscape. The latter was particularly unfounded because modernist architects "respected the landscape, too," Serraino said. "They did everything they could to preserve trees." Thorne even designed a notch in the roof of the Brubeck house to spare one.
Serraino hopes "NorCalMod" might help preserve the remaining midcentury homes -- none of which are protected as landmarks -- and influence a new generation of architects.
"The book creates a sponsorship for modernism that was always here. We just have to keep developing that sense of modernity with the technology of our time."
See for yourself
In addition to discovering midcentury modern houses in the new book "NorCalMod," by Pierluigi Serraino, you can see them for yourself. Here are those he visited recently in the East Bay. (Most are easily viewed from the road, unless otherwise noted.)
Metz House (1957), by Donald Olsen. 221 Bishop Ave., Richmond. (Difficult to see.)
Brubeck House (1954), by Beverley "David" Thorne. 6630 Heartwood Drive, Oakland.
Weston Havens House (1941), Harwell Hamilton Harris. 255 Panoramic Way. (Difficult to see from Panoramic Way; for a better view, try Dwight Way.)
Kip House (1952), Donald Olsen. 775 San Diego Road, Berkeley.
Olsen House (1954), 771 San Diego Road, Berkeley.
Taves House (1957), Donald Olsen. 1366 Brewster Drive, Kensington.
-- J.F.
Authors on Architecture: Serraino on Creativity
SAH/SCC Lecture & Book Signing
Saturday, October 29,2016, 02:00 PM
Cover. Photo: , Authors on Architecture: Serraino on Creativity, SAH/SCC Lecture & Book Signing
A fascinating, but little-known, study of architects in the late 1950s is intricately uncovered by author and architect Pierluigi Serraino, AIA, in his book The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study (The Monacelli Press, 2016). SAH/SCC’s “Authors on Architecture” welcomes San Francisco-based Serraino to discuss his newest book.
Among the 40 architects contributing to the study, held at Berkeley’s institute of Personality Assessment and Research, were Eero Saarinen, FAIA, Louis I. Kahn, FAIA, Philip Johnson, FAIA, George Nelson, Richard Neutra, FAIA, Eliot Noyes, Pietro Belluschi, FAIA, Serge Chermayeff, and A. Quincy Jones, FAIA. This august group participated in both solitary and group testing of their creativity abilities. Deploying an array of tests reflecting then-current psychological theories, the study sought to answer questions that still apply to creative practice today: What makes a person creative? What personality traits are necessary to actualize that creativity?
Although originally intended for publication, the findings are only now being made available. Serraino culled through primary documents from numerous sources to show how some of American’s greatest architects evaluated their own creativity—as well as that of their peers—and how they perceived their place in architectural history.
Serraino is an expert chronicler of modern architecture, having contributed to many magazines and journals, as well as authoring several books, including Modernism Rediscovered (Taschen, 2000), Eero Saarinen (Taschen, 2005), and NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism (Chronicle Books, 2006). Herman Miller’s LA showroom (Lynch/Eisinger/Design, 2009) will generously host us as we enjoy this intriguing look into the creative minds of modernism.
Authors on Architecture: Serraino—Saturday, October 29, 2016; 2-4PM; Herman Miller, 3641 Holdrege Ave., LA; free; registration strongly requested—call 800.972.4722, email info@sahscc.org or go to www.sahscc.org.