City metaphors

These spreads, from O.M. Ungers' Morphologie: City Metaphors (1976), were an attempt to spark a richer and more productive discussion over urban form. All design begins with images:

"In every human being there is a strong metaphysical desire to create a reality structured through images in which objects become meaningful through vision and which does not (...) exist because it is measured."

His argument, stated obliquely in the introduction, was that an approach based too much measurable criteria- square metres, pounds and pence- had been left denuded of conceptual sophistication, instinct, and depth.

Symbolic, analogical or metaphorical thinking was not meant to act as a substitute for statistical analysis, but did hope to break its "claim [to] a monopoly of understanding".

Like many fascinating books of the seventies, Ungers' Morphologie was fighting a battle that is definitely now finished. The functionalist technocracy that he was tilting at- all point blocks and space standards- would be totally gone in most of Europe and America within a decade, and the burgeoning of symbolic thinking in architectural and urban design would produce only the rottenly ubiquitous, self-consciously self-serving 'icon'.

That isn't Ungers' fault, and, unlike some of his contemporaries, he isn't blasé about the potential for a great big metaphor to be fatuous, or stupid, without proper analysis and criticism. The creative and pragmatic would alternate, not as "opposed [methods], but more in the direction that analysis and synthesis alternate as naturally as breathing in and breathing out, as Goethe put it..."