for jonathan lee...from dan...

Dear Jonathan:Please take a look at this book.Art and IllusionA Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation by EH Gombrich(1956)This is a classic book , maybe a bit dated by now but still valuable to the history of the topic. Some of his connections to Roland Jacobson “Theory of Communication” (page 370), and the Charles Osgood “The Measurement of meaning” (page 371) I have found useful to reconnecting back to architecture by using his tools of investigating the semantic world of a client or a group of users. He, like you, is looking for a way to discover “common forms” (in your vocabulary.These are short quotes from Chapter XI “ From representation to Expression”He writes about Synaesthesia on pages 366-371”…This (Synaesthesia) is dangerous ground, a favorite hunt of cranks and even madman, and yet I think it is ground which will have to be traversed . For we all feel that sounds can indeed imitate or match visual impressions….What is called synesthesia the splashing over of impressions from one sense modality to another, is a fact to which all languages testify….” (p 367)“..Granted even that most of us experience such synesthetic images with more or less intensity,are they not completely subjective and private,inaccessible and uncommunicable ? Can there be real objective discoveries of good and better matches in these elusive spheres as there were in the discovery of visual analogies to visual experience ? Can the world of the mind, of the dream, be explored by experiments that result in accepted conventions as was the world of the waking eye ?……For this analysis has taught us to remain aware of three factors: (1) the medium, the (2) mental set, and (3) the problem of equivalence “ (p 368)“It is my conviction that the problem of synesthesis will cease to look embarrassingly arbitrary and subjective if here, too, we fix our attention not on likeness of elements but on structural relationships within a scale matrix……..It was Professor Rolland Jackobson who drew my attention to the fact that synesthesia concerns relationships.……In their recent book The Measurement of Meaning, Professor Charles Osgood and his collaborators have submitted a similar technique to rigorous statistical analysis…..”You should take a look at these sources. If you don’t find them I will help.Dan