Revisiting a decades-old study prompts Alex Ely to consider the roots of architectural creativity

Buildings.

Words
Alex Ely

 

If, as the aphorism has it, ‘the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources’, then the odds of the most creative American architects willingly revealing their approaches to creativity would not seem good. But that is exactly what happened in research led by Donald MacKinnon at the University of California, Berkeley, between 1957 and 1959, which was recently revisited in Pierluigi Serraino’s book ‘The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study’ (Monacelli).

For McKinnon, architecture represented an ideal prism through which to apprehend creativity in action. An extraordinary roll-call of celebrated architects took part, including Louis Kahn, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen and Richard Neutra. Participants were selected by a panel from the College of Environmental Design, which scored them on technology, visual form, planning and human awareness, and social potential. Having ranked their subjects from ‘most’ to ‘least’ creative, the researchers identified the 40 most outstanding and a control group of 43 less successful ones. A further 41 were invited to participate in questionnaires.

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The architects went though a three-day battery of tests covering categories such as ‘Measures of intellectual, perceptual, and cognitive functions’, ‘Measures of interest and values’, and ‘Personality inventories’. Along with familiar perception tests such as the Myers-Briggs, there was a bewildering array of assessments such as mosaic design, drawing completion test, symbol equivalent test and Movement-threshold Inkblot tests.

The objective was to uncover the constants of creativity, the environmental conditions enabling it, and the personality profiles of those who made it the centre of their lives. The study found that creatives “consistently safeguard their self-determination in order to stay their course and pursue what interests them no matter what, in fierce escape from conformism of thought and behaviour”. Far from being superheroes, creative individuals were found to be psychiatrically turbulent, flawed, restless and vulnerable, but independent in thought and action, and exceptionally driven.

The study illuminated two aspects of creativity – personality and process. A number of stages were identified for the creative process: ‘Preparation’, acquiring the necessary skills; ‘Concentrated effort’ in studying a problem; ‘Incubation’ – a period of frustration when doors are opened to unconscious problem solving; ‘Insight’, the Eureka moment when a solution appears credible; and ‘Verification’, the testing of the idea. As for personality traits, all the leading creatives were imaginative, active, honest, idealistic, civilised, conscientious, intelligent, reasonable, adaptable, determined, individualistic, appreciative, cooperative, enthusiastic and serious.

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The findings reinforce a more succinct analysis reported in Ernest Jones’ biography of Sigmund Freud, who recognised creativity as a product of certain key attributes and behaviours. Among them are the ability to generalise and separate significant from unimportant, passive surrender to mental tasks, intense emotions along with capacity for self control, spontaneity, loneliness, deep concentration, self-discipline, and scepticism combined with a willingness to believe.

I can find much to identify with in both: it is only in moments of deep thought that I find space for ideas to flourish, but too often, with the distractions of the day-to-day demands of the office, our time dedicated to deep concentration, passive surrender and productive creativity is eroded.

Where I query both Freud’s analysis and the premise of the mid-century study is in their implicit assumption that creative solutions are the product of individual talent rather than team effort. Today many of our problems will only be solved through open and collaborative creative processes. At Mæ our weekly office-wide design reviews allow everyone to critique and to creatively enrich a project, and contribute to problem-solving without having to ask for permission or being subject to hierarchy. In the words of Pixar president Edwin Catmull, “If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better”. If there is some truth to the theory that creativity is about the hiding of sources, it’s also true that it resides in open, active exchange.