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HAROLD AS FEEDBACK’S FOIL

IMPROVISATIONAL COMEDY AND ARCHITECTURE

Sarah Hirschman

Architects speak about the needs of users with program diagrams in project proposals, and sometimes they perform post-occupancy surveys, but most often the ideas that drive a conceptual design aren’t ever actually tested in a real way, nor do they benefit from feedback. We’re left with a disconnect between intention and results. In comedy, the test of efficacy is immediate and results are clear—if someone laughs at a joke, it’s a success. Looking closely at the way humour works, then, could potentially reveal clues about how architecture might incorporate feedback into its design process. In his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud writes that the joke is “a double-dealing rascal who serves two masters at once. Everything in jokes that is aimed at gaining pleasure is calculated with an eye toward the third person […] and this gives us a full impression of how indispensable this third person is for the completion of the joking process.”¹ The joke has two-way communication built into it; it is a call that demands a response to properly function. The joke is a social act as well as a creative one. Jokes invite responses, and while they might be quite different from those architects seek to induce, the way they operate as a deliberate exchange of information can teach us something about being consciously responsive in the design process.

Feedback generally refers to something exterior to the process of designing—the collection of data from clients or users. Not only does there lack a clear rubric for interpretation of this data, there’s no standard mandate to collect it. How do we weigh the reported experience of one constituency over another, and how do we confirm the conclusions others make? Who decides what data gets collected and how it gets used? This essay proposes a new model for understanding communication and collaboration in the design process following Keller Easterling’s observation: “Architects typically love manners, utopias and crises. We love to make difficult questions harder. We love to train [ourselves] to do labourintensive tasks,” and so “a better role for the architect is not that of an optimizer but that of a comedian.”² The architect’s comedy is increasingly conversational, especially as worksharing software like Autodesk Revit imposes a continual call-and-response within the office in its insatiable saving-to-central. Easterling’s “architect-as-comedian” operates just at the threshold of futility, dispensing with traditional “hierarchical, ‘atelier’ culture,” in favour of direct engagement with “larger cultural organizations that actually direct most of the space-making.”³ Improvisation has been present in one form or another within architecture since the middle of the last century; this essay considers a structured subset of improvisational comedy, what might be known as “Chicago-style improv,” for rigorous insight into intentional collaboration, and posit a way in which feedback can thrive within structure.

Though the basic tenets of improvisation—spontaneity, use of material at hand—remain relatively consistent, its implications and the way improvised works are received vary widely across creative fields and through time. Where the improvisation of abstract impressionist painters like Jackson Pollock might be said to access deep subconscious knowledge (an individualistic perspective) an alternate approach that became popular in the 1960s regarded improvisation instead as a kind of extreme form of collaboration. According to American Studies professor Daniel Belgrad, “this model privileged ensemble work, typically in performing arts like music and dance. In this kind of work, the artists’ creative ideas were understood to emerge not ‘from the depths’ of the unconscious mind, but from the group dynamic.”⁴ This emphasized group improvisation as a way to create new works rather than considering improvisation as akin to a revelatory psychoanalysis for an individual to explore.

Architecture has flirted with improvisation before. In architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace project (1964), users were invited to manipulate their environments and create hyper-customized and specific forms that suited their needs. The Fun Palace was, as architectural historian/theorist Stanley Mathews points out, “not really a building at all but a vast, socially interactive machine, an improvisational architecture, constantly changing in a ceaseless cycle of assembly and dismantling.”⁵ In Price’s project, the users were the improvisers, not the architect. He would provide a base set of materials or possibilities, but users were tasked with transforming them to make spaces work. Mathews contends that this version of improvisation tracks the social politics of the 1960s, a shift from a Modernist worldview of “unchanging ideality, abstract space and purity, to a Heraclitean view of a world in constant flux.”⁶ The architect might have some broad ideas about how to support growth or change, but the Fun Palace contends that only users know what suits their needs. Improvisation here means interactive, flexible, easily adjustable. If indeed the “programmatic fluidity and formal indeterminacy of the Fun Palace is an architectural analogue to the transformations experienced throughout postwar British society,” per Mathews, then perhaps there’s another version of consciously improvisational design similarly suited to our time.⁷

Cedric Price, Fun palace, 1964. Model. Image courtesy of Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

IDEO’s Brainstorming Rules are printed on small cards for easy reference. Image reproduced with permission from Devin Peek/IDEO, courtesy of the author.

The British feminist design collective Matrix, begun in the late 1970s, was also interested in the role of the user in developing program and making design decisions. But unlike the post-facto improvisation of the Fun Palace, Matrix sought to incorporate users into the design process from the start of a project’s conception. They reconceived the visioning stage of a project as a collaboration with clients and end users, and made attempts to mirror the kind of non-hierarchical structures they aimed for their own practice, eschewing titles and forming the company as a worker-owned cooperative. Matrix’s feminism led the group to advocate for changes to sexist design standards that didn’t take into account all users’ contingencies—they pointed to things like the difficulty of navigating public spaces with children in tow, or the fact that, for many households, the male partner had primary access to the family car, as evidences of biases embedded in designed spaces. As a result, according to Janie Grote, they “started from the premise that the building belonged to the client/users and not to the architect.”⁸

Where Cedric Price aimed to design a framework within which unknown future users could freely experiment, the Matrix collective sought to know their users directly and to actively involve them in decision making. In order to do so, “it was recognized that strategies needed to be developed to enable the client group to be involved in and have control over the design. By such a joint approach, it was anticipated that, no matter how small the project, it would be possible to produce a building whose quality satisfies its users.”⁹ Matrix’s approach was improvisational in the sense that it required the creation of a new work process to combat embedded power structures. They identified a gendered dynamic in the provision of design services and developed what they called a “consultative” approach: “one that aims at re-shaping power relationships between the ‘expert’ and the ‘layperson’, necessarily allows women as clients to be involved at every stage of the design process and devises the means to do so.”¹⁰ Importantly, this process also involved evaluating the conventional tools of architectural representation—models and drawings—for their latent projections of authority, and producing something more malleable, more open to conversation and change.

The Law Firm improv group performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Arin Sang-urai, 2016. New York City.

For the Jagonari Education Resource Centre project, that meant producing models for the client team “to dismantle and re-assemble to assist in agreeing on the final plans,” and in general seems to have meant eschewing the glossy look of ‘final’ renderings and drawings in favour of representations that appear more modest and easily adjusted.¹¹

More recently an appetite for creative business practices has made popular a set of principles loosely titled ‘Design Thinking’, which extends beyond architecture and even design into many collaborative processes. In contrast to the Cedric Price or Matrix models, Design Thinking focusses primarily on the idea-generation portion of a project, no matter what the final product might be, with the insight that a successful design process is not linear but associative and unpredictable. Easily recognizable for its allegiance to Post-It Notes and popularity in the technology companies of Silicon Valley, Design Thinking promotes openness and non-judgemental encouragement among team members. Importantly, rather than the amorphous or difficult to test values of the earlier examples, IDEO, a design research firm and leading proponent of the process, has codified specific rules for brainstorming, which they distribute on small cards: “Defer Judgment, Encourage Wild Ideas, Build on the Ideas of Others, Stay Focused on Topic, One Conversation at a Time, Be Visual, Go for Quantity.”¹² The enthusiasm with which Design Thinking ideas have been adopted suggests that structured creative group processes are generative. While IDEO’s rules provide a framework for brainstorming, the complex phasing of architectural projects and the need to continuously collaborate throughout begs for additional parameters.

Not all improvisational comedy works the same way, so it’s important to be clear for this proposal. A common misconception is that improv happens by accident, but the most enduring and popular formats are in fact hemmed in by clear boundaries. Chicago-style improv, in particular the ‘Harold’, a format developed in the 1960s and ’70s by improvisational theatre groups like Second City and Improv Olympic teams in Chicago, is particularly instructive as a model for design collaboration because it provides a very specific minimum amount of framework to both support the kind of wild creativity IDEO’s brainstorm rules call for and at the same time ensure resolution. The Harold typically starts with a quick warm up game based on a topic of the audience’s suggestion and is followed by a series of spontaneous unrelated scenes that are, with a few more rounds, brought together to a coherent and often surprising conclusion. As performer and comedy historian Rob Kozlowski tells it, “like the television show [Seinfeld], in a Harold three disparate stories recur in a three-by-three structure (three scenes each appearing three times) before ultimately converging in the end. The humour comes out of the ways in which the themes, characters and stories connect and combine, rather than from jokes.”¹³ Del Close, who developed the format, “thought of the Harold as a sonata form. Themes would be established, a group of characters would return again and again in scenes and then the scenes would work off one another.”¹⁴ The important element here is that closure is built into a process that begins with radical openness.

Taking it a step beyond brainstorming at IDEO, which serves to get as many ideas on the wall as possible but doesn’t say what to do with them once they’re there, the Harold empowers individual performers to develop quick scenes out of an initial brainstorm and encourages their teammates to jump on board. The strength of the Harold, and improvisation generally, is that once a piece of information has been established within a scene, all participants are required to accept it as true and to move forward. All performers are equal in their ability to affect and direct a scenario. As described by Matt Fotis, “improvisation is a system of creativity, a mindset that focuses on the cooperation of a group of players to create completely original performances based on set structures and rules that can be performed spontaneously in front of an audience (performance based) or used as a means for generating material.”¹⁵ By establishing an additive process, hierarchies in architectural office structures that normally govern editing are rendered moot, perhaps happily so. Per Del Close’s fifth rule: “Your prime responsibility is to support.”¹⁶

Thinking through the production of architecture and architectural ideas with the help of the Harold provides a framework whereby collaboration and radical acceptance is productive. It isn’t cynical to invite negative externalities into a comprehensive view of the design process, it’s realistic. The Improv model considers all inputs equally valid. When mapped onto an architectural process, things like building codes, client demands, budget and climate can all be assimilated into a coherent worldview and viewed as similarly unproblematic. By conceiving of design as a performance, as a process with rules and strategies for all involved, it can become the consciously collaborative act Cedric Price and Matrix were aiming for. Per Close’s first rule, every collaborator is a supporting actor.

The sudden ubiquity of architecture work-sharing tools like Revit is undertheorized and presents an opportunity to inject improvisation’s collaborative ambitions directly into an office’s workflow. The repetitive act of ‘Saving to Central’ when changes made to a local version of a file are pushed back to a shared master file is the contemporary version of “calling a scene” in the Harold—exercising judgment to determine when a collective act has found its end and when personal insight returns to collective knowledge. The software already has the “yes, and” mentality of building upon a collaborator’s work—it pulls up an error message when conflicting information is pushed into the central model—so establishing collaborative processes like analogues to the Harold within office hierarchies is within reach. Freud’s third person might be sitting right next to you; architecture might best be produced when its processes are intentional when collaboration integrates its own feedback loop, when the performance of work is the objective in and of itself.

The effect of embedding these principles, following architect David P. Brown’s call for a jazz-like design process, “does transform, shift and expand architecture practice from an emphasis on the design of objects to an emphasis on the coordination and manipulation of resources, including the production of objects, to facilitate access to processes.”¹⁷ Allowing for looseness in the generation of a design might provide for looseness in using it too.

01Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).

02Keller Easterling, “A Short Contemplation on Money and Comedy,” Thresholds 18: Design + Money (1999): 15.

03Ibid., 16.

04Daniel Belgrad, “Improvisation, Democracy, and Feedback,” George E. Lewis & Benjamin Piekut, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 289.

05Stanley Mathews, “The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture: Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy,” Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 59, No. 3 (February 2006): 39.

06Ibid., 41.

07Ibid., 46.

08Janie Grote, “Matrix: A Radical Approach to Architecture,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Vol. 9, No. 2, Special Issue: Women’s Voices in Architecture and Planning (Summer, 1992): 160.

09Ibid.

10Ibid., 161.

11Ibid., 164.

12IDEO Rules for Brainstorming provided by IDEO/ Devin Peek via email, 23 April 2018.

13Matt Fotis, Long Form Improvisation and American Comedy: the Harold (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6.

14Rob Kozlowski, The Art of Chicago Improv (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 28.

15Fotis, 5.

16Cited in Fotis, 7. Del Close’s eleven rules for performing a Harold:

•You are all supporting actors.

•Always check your impulses.

•Never enter a scene unless you are needed.

•Save your fellow actor; don’t worry about the piece.

•Your prime responsibility is to support.

•Work at the top of your brains at all times.

•Never underestimate or condescend to your audience.

•No jokes (unless it is tipped in front that it is a joke).

•Trust … Trust your fellow actors to support you; trust them to come through if you lay something heavy on them; trust yourself.

•Avoid judging what is going down except in terms of whether it needs help (either by entering or cutting), what can best follow, or how you can support it imaginatively if your support is called for.

•LISTEN!

17David P. Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), (xvi).