Architects that had to be businessmen, had to be journalists, had to be psychoanalysts, had to be artists, had to be everything. And so from a cognitive perspective, they presented a wide array of skills that would be ideal to be studied under the microscope. Welcome to Archimetic Sessions, 1-1. I'm Amelia, and this week I'm speaking with Pierre-Louis G.
Serino, architect and author of The Creative Architect. In the late 1950s, some of the most prominent architects of the day gathered in Berkeley, California, to take part in the Landmark Psychological Experiment on Creativity. Eros Aronin, Philip Johnson, Richard Noichard, William Perera, and dozens of other architects were put through a barrage of tests and surveys, to begin a better understanding of what creativity is and its place in architecture. For the first time, data and results of the study are now available in Serino's book.
We spoke about the context of psychological research in the 1950s and the ongoing evolution of the creative architect. Pierre-Louis G. Serino, thank you so much for joining us on 1-1. I'm so glad to feature this book, The Creative Architect, super fascinating study done by psychologists in the 1950s around the nature of creativity, specifically of architects, setting some of the most famous architects at the time, and trying to figure out exactly how their creativity manifests and what creativity is.
So to go back in time, about 50 years in psychological history, could you set the stage for what the general psychological consensus was at the era of the study in the late 1950s, around what creativity was, what it meant? As a premise, I am an architect and a practicing architect. I'm not a psychologist, a psychologist, and when I approached this research, I was fairly green. I learned quite a bit along the way.
My surrogate mentor was Ravenna Healthson, who was one of the researchers in the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at Berkeley. And really, at the time we were talking about, initially in 1950, there was a consensus that creativity was something that could be studied in a scientific fashion. Much of the interest of the medical community was into pathology, and that's a fairly well-known factor. But later in the century, interest shifted or expanded to include the health individual functioning, in particular optimal circumstances.
And one of that was creativity. And creativity became somewhat of an object of obsession in the context of the Cold War as the Soviets at reach the space age later in the fiftiest decade. And there was already an understanding that intelligence correlated up to a certain point, meaning that being more intelligent reached a certain threshold did not equate to being more creative. There was something else that was playing out in this particular inner motion of feelings of the psychodynamic.
And there are some cultural circumstances, but also historical circumstances. Many of these scientists that had been in the field of psychology were recruited in the World War II effort. And a great number of them was at the Office of Strategic Services in the C, which was in the former CIA. And so there is a part of the military industrial complex that spilled over into research aims that were not tied to any military benefits or military advantage.
And this shift went from effectiveness, the idea of finding individuals, identifying individuals that could perform in situations of great duress, take responsibilities, leadership in resistance groups, espionage and roles of this nature. And then adopting some of those methods, and in this case, what was very popular at the time was the assessment method and use it to study creativity. In the 50s, one of the biggest obstacles was to find representative sample groups. It is easier to retroactively try to reconstruct the circumstances of creativity through secondary sources, literature, secondhand accounts or also in a way, journaling.
But it's kind of self-reporting as also some limits, how accurate are these memories. So the arriving samples that were statistically significant became a major target to yield reliable findings. And so there were the previous studies that were thoroughly circumstride about studying creative characters through interviews. But again, the interview setting as it is so limits is accounting of things that have happened in the past, the researcher gets the sense of the personality, but it's pretty much it.
This one that happened in Berkeley was the first systematic to my knowledge and just looking at the literature at this scale where they really targeted the creative person identified through a series of screening processes, which were quite rigorous in the context of something that is rigorous. You know, there are still human beings involved. So there you might factor as we know it today, it exists in the scientific enterprise as well. And they decided to pick people at the top of their field and they had enough funding to have them come to Berkeley in weekends, three-day weekends.
And the study of the architects was probably the most revered, well-known, sought after because of the nature of the characters that were involved into the study. So before we get too much deeper into the actual study, I'd like to hear a little bit more about the person behind the study and you referenced briefly the kind of backstory to a lot of the psychological research going on in the mid-century as related to the military industrial context of having this a lot of psychologists being involved in the war. And specifically the leader of this study, Donald McKinnon was selected by the government to help screen potential spies and kind of counterinsurgence to gate efforts overseas. Can you tell me a little bit more about Don's work in particular and how he first started becoming interested in architects in particular?
So Donald McKinnon was originally from Maine. He got his education in New England and in the 1930s, he got exposed to Harvard psychology, Harry Murey, who had his own lab and he started using the study of the methods. Harry Murey was also recruited as part of the OSS, but there was an age difference. Murey was older and was more advanced, was already accomplished by 1930s.
There was a shift in that period to the idea of personality that the person, the individual, was a repository of information that needed to be retrieved in some form. Also McKinnon met with Jung, he was interested in the work of other ranks. So, he did go to Europe and tried to visit as many of these folks as possible. In the war, because of his previous relationship with Murey, he was recruited to be part of the OSS team that was going to study or at least to find a method to identify the folks that would do these special missions.
And shortly after the Station S, which is the one that was essentially done in the Virginia, I can't remember right now specifically, he became the head of that unit. And so, all the way to the war. So, he had this method down and at the end of the war, he co-wrote mainly, really himself, a book called the Assessment of Men, that encapsulated the experience, the logic behind it, also the limits of that experience. And a number of these individuals, together with McKinnon, arrived in Berkeley in 1949.
Some of them went to Stanford, some of them stayed in Berkeley, another one that is in Stanford, who was in Berkeley for a while. And they were in Berkeley for a while until there was the Year of the OSS, which was a very famous episode where scientists had to essentially pledge allegiance to the institution saying that they had no ties to the Communist Party. A number of folks defected in one of the biggest losses for UC Berkeley was Eric Ericsson, who helped to found the Institute of Personality Assessment Research in 1949, that then slowly moved to more of his own interest in child psychology and then ultimately went to the Northeast. So, McKinnon was very plugged in into the Bay of Psychology.
He wasn't necessarily Freudian, he was more Jungian, but he was trying to reconcile more of these traditions. And again, he never really studied pathology. He studied the Health and Individual and creativity, remained initially effectiveness and before that personality remained, is primary focus. So, that's where he put all his intellectual ambition, research effort and political influence to gather funds and for the purpose of this particular study of the architects, he became the primary spokesperson.
The reason why he was so interested in architects was because he had identified three types of creatives. Those that were in the arts, that they were essentially activating their intuitive traits more than others. And those were the obvious artists that would be in the category. That was the second type.
That was the creative scientist. People that were exposing, listening, but there was active reasoning and somehow they were interested in organizing the material in alternative ways. And then there were people that were a bit of both and he put the architects into the category. So, for him, the architect had to incorporate so many skills in the process of doing what he or she does.
And in the time, it was all men that were involved in. He was very explicit about that in terms of what we have. He admitted it, actually said it later in his life. There were more women in the writers group and the children's writers book, the children's books writer and things like that.
So, the architects that had to be business men, had to be journalists, had to be psychoanalysts, had to be artists, had to be everything. And so, from a cognitive perspective, they presented a wide array of skills that would be ideal to be studied under the microscope. And the actual architects recruited for the study are just an incredible roster of the most famous practicing architects of their day. Although, while not all of them that were invited were actually able to participate, but just to rattle off some of the names, the study included Philip Johnson, Errol Serenand, Charles Eames, Paul Rudolph, A Quincy Jones, Richard Neidra, William Pereira.
And that isn't even half of them. How many architects total participated in the study and how were they particularly chosen? So, 40 architects came to Berkeley in groups of 10. They were chosen in a very meticulous way.
When the I-PART folks sought grants and they received a very generous one through the government corporation, they specifically said, we are not going to choose the people at the top of their game ourselves. We're going to ask a panel of experts to pick those and then get the selection process going. And we will study the individuals once the selection has been done and people have accepted. So, at the time, the most powerful figure in architecture circles in Northern California was William Worcester, who was the dean of the architecture school from 1950 to 1963, I believe.
And he at the time was approached by McKinnon and asked to help in this project. And so, Worcester recruited four faculty members. So, there was a five-member panel on which he was kind of the head, technically there would be a sort of a result of a role and responsibility. So, it was Bill Worcester, it was Joe Escherich, Donald Olsen, Bernard DeMar, and Philip Teal, who was more of a naval architect that had just been brought in to join the UC faculty.
And there's a six-member that is unofficial, but was equally consequential, and that is Elizabeth Kendall-Pamson, who was the West Coast editor of Architecture Records from 1947 to 1975, who coached very, very caring way. She was truly invested into the question, and she was a truly remarkable activist, a wonderful woman, a wonderful writer. And she coached McKinnon in all architecture questions. At some point, she wrote the definition of architecture creativity that we reported into the book as a way to establish work creativity in architecture in this particular field meant.
And so, these five members individually filled out these forms, and they came up with their names, each other list of names. And, you know, I remember I spoke with Donald and he passed away a couple of years ago, and for many years I was quite close. He was studying me that he had suggested the name of Paul Nelson, who was a very, very important American architect who had moved to Paris, and he was going to be back in the U.S. And he said to my greatest surprise, nobody had ever heard of Paul Nelson.
And the fact that, you know, as informed as these folks were, that you have in a series of characters that might escape, this casting of the net of who could be the most important artist, it's quite an important thing. And in fact, in the book, I outlined some of the names that have been missed out, for example, Frédé Quiesler. I mean, it's hard to imagine that Quiesler is not considered a creative architect. I mean, I would find anyone who might like his work, but he was definitely creative.
And then there was a strict ideological line, so it had to be, that could not be crossed. They could not agree on thinking that Buskoff was a creative architect. But to a large extent, it was because, that was so steep into the Bauhaus, a set of principles and ideology, it was such a devout, committed believer in Grogius that there was no space for the work of organic strand. So even though they had good words for Frédé Quiesler, it was never going to fly.
So anyone associated with, you know, saying Al-Dendau of Michigan that they tried to recruit and others, anyone that had some relationship with Frédédé Quiesler would not fare well. And that's not a thing because it seems so ironic that in a study of creativity, there would be such a state ideological bent that there wouldn't be any swaying from this particular understanding that this is the kind of successful architect that we're targeting as a subject of study. And just in general, how you would then want to create a reliable sample group of somewhat comparable participants to take part in the study without also deferring to a diversity of styles. Yeah, that is, that is when you know, you tried to do this in a very objective way, but then there are human factors.
Why would you not bring in someone of that caliber? And at the same time, you know, there was a, you know, one of the criteria for the study was that the architects had to be in the United States. They didn't have the study to be American, but at the time of the study, they had to be United States. So there was an evaluation of Alvar Alto, and everybody says Alvar Alto is the greatest.
It's primarily Worcester, but Bernard de Mar is there and Joe Eshrick and Donaldson is the only one that's a little more restrained because he's a total groupist fan. But that makes you understand why you see Berkeley enabled a particular development in our conceptual culture that was closer to some attachment to the land, some way of a specializing relationship with the organic and anything that to do an industrial basis. So you could see in the evaluation of the corner of Grazman that, you know, encouraged you to see the one that it sent you. You know, the guy is all interested in joinery.
Well, that is an aspect of the work that you would say is the same in Nice and Charles Eames. So there are factions which are not necessarily a clashing. They're simply identifying a particular aspect of the architecture making and developing an architecture expression and an ideology, you know, a world of cause and effect and consequences and formalism. So that to me was really, really powerful, really, really fast to understand what they were thinking and they took this exercise in earnest.
So there was an identity in the architecture editors who go through the same exercise. And an aspect that took place was that it was clear that for many creativity had some certain correlation in the amount of press that you were going to get. But you have to think that there are some creative artists who absolutely do not care about the press. And Mark Mills was one here, Beverly Thorne was the last surviving artist of the case that he has programmed as no interest whatsoever in the press.
Gaudy only had two articles in the April Index, you know, the time of the study. Actually, the time of his death and then Erving Gill had virtually no coverage. So are these artists no creative? And you simply, you don't want to say what's right, what's wrong.
You simply identify holes in this monolithic approach to studying something, but to counteract that, the Ipartime tried to find some statistical correlation. Let's say, okay, so we have these, these architects that have been rated by panel members and then have been rated by the editors. And then they also asked the artist that participated to rank themselves. And that was extraordinary.
That was absolutely mind-boggling because they signed the paper. And you know when you look at the guest book that the signature is the same. They did it themselves first and you really see the hierarchy of how they understood themselves. So out of the 40 architects, 32 returned the form.
So we don't have the one by George Nelson or Richard Noitra, you know, which is really unfortunate. But we got some very amazing characters that return the form. Build out, you know, Louis Kahn. If you look at the way Kahn writes the number eight, it's astonishing.
There's so much clarity and so much serenity. And you know, he doesn't put himself number one. But you know, of course, Johnson's growing up with himself as number one. And Saturday number one, and a number of other characters.
So when you do that, not only you're having, you're looking at also at the, in this particular study, but this was a cross section of where the so much idealized mid-century modern was. They were all, they identified 86 characters in which they extended a little more because someone else brought us some names. And one of those names was Victor Lundy. And so Victor Lundy ultimately was brought in and part of the study.
But you know, they go through Yamasaki, they go through Victor Gruen, they go through everybody. And so you know what people stand. You know who was really in the main at the time. We know the geopolitical map in architecture across the United States.
You know, where Peter Or whether there was control for that in the actual study. Those that were coming from out of town, they were being housed at the Claremont Hotel. So they were being picked up at the airport and I got some letters. So like for example called Stoller who was still around with us.
Rolovitz Rolov was going to pick up Louis Kahn and Donaldson was going to pick up Sir Sharmayev. They all came and the assessment schedule shows you that they spent most of their time at I-PAR just going through these testing. And what happens is that the, the artists were studying both when they were doing, going through the procedures. And when they were informally talking to each other, it was sort of a tour de force of human policing.
They wanted to understand how they were when they were under, you know, outside of such rigid scrutiny. And they were aware of it, how they were interacting with each other. So for architects to come, the real reason to a large extent was to socialize. Most likely we're going to be in some kind of committee.
We're going to be trying to represent it for the government, for the private sector. And they were going to give each other's projects. So when Sarin and finally decided to come, everybody wanted to come. And then Victor Landon, right away, yes, I'm coming.
I can't wait to meet Sarin and stuff like that. You know, even in terms of things he was supposed to come but he couldn't. He couldn't be on a Friday but he could have a private society that would have compromised the nature of the data. And then he couldn't have the last minute.
So let's talk about a little bit more of the actual studies and the kind of tests or evaluations that were going on to try to form this idea of creativity. Can you tell me a little bit about the different ways that architects were tested and evaluated? There was one graphic test, which is a mosaic test. And it had been widely reported that in early conversations or any speeches by Charles Eames about the mosaic test where John's asked how many colors he had used.
You have 22 colors you could choose from to fill out 8 by 10 red. And you have to fill out the whole thing with the tiles. And he said, you know, I used two colors, black and white. And then they are Sarah who was next to him.
Arrow, how many colors did you use? I used only white. And I found all those mosaics all nicely put together. And so that was the only procedure that would allow some kind of aesthetic message.
The others were tests that were in nature trying to elicit some kind of lateral thinking. For example, they had a set of drawings that they had to do based on given lines, you know, two conversion lines. And they had to make up as many images as possible that were credible, you know, not letters, images of things out of those two lines. They had to tell stories about inkblots.
It was called the Rorschars test. And, you know, people that think in very conventional manners will come up with stories immediately obvious as you look at a particular image. But some people that are really quite out there, they make an extraordinary stories that are tied in some form to that image. But they got all a totally different tangent.
And they could be credible statistically, it might be unlikely, but it is possible. And then there was another one about the remote association test, which was, you know, they were given, actually it was one called word association test. Where they were given a word about something and then they would have to correlate associate another word that could have to do with a particular word. In one example, it is important because later this test was developed further by one of the scientists that was at the beginning of his career there, son of Mednik.
And he said, you know, he did the same experiment in Minnesota. And he said, you know, we grew up a thousand students and they had, we showed them a table. And then we asked them to do, you know, associate a word. And then they used the word chair and 100 used the word plate.
So you go statistically to answers are infrequent, but then they're still tied to the table. And then there are a few that say some extraordinary things, totally off the market, but they're still tied to the table. And so that became in a way an aspect that was central in the findings. It's just that you are tied to a real situation, a real thing, but you are giving a response that is not patterned in a standard way.
And that is what singles out the project stand to the creative person in what is called the creative product. You know, in order to discuss creativity, you have to define it. So that was, there was some of the procedures. Many of them were about check marks.
There was the adjective checklist for self and ideal, meaning that they were from, I don't know, 200 adjectives. They had to choose those that applied to themselves and that would apply to the ideal architect. And ironically, why they thought that this ideal architect was a super individual. There was always cordial, sexy, was dandy, was this and that.
They portrayed themselves as somewhat neurotic, flawed, anxious. And he was almost across the board. So there was an anxiety that seemed to be inconsistent with the image. They had all the people, you know, the kind of idea that they were trying to reach themselves.
And they were the idea architect to the eyes of the world. So right there, you have a way to declare aspects of your psychic turbulence that become really interesting. And in many respects that redeem all of us throughout whatever we have internally, but we can still function in the field of our choice. That's so fascinating because you think also about the elevation of the architect and as a status as a celebrity today and how it has so much to do still with that kind of ego and that swagger where the media context, of course, has changed so drastically around architecture within those last 50 years between the study and now.
But there is still this expectation that the architect might be that kind of ego, just I wonder if it's still the same that they're all just closeted anxious. I wouldn't be surprised. That is one of the reasons why specifically in the context of architecture, I find that the study is telling us a lasting story. But the book, as I said, a number of other exchanges is really about creativity because the focus of the iPad wasn't was an architecture was creativity and they asked us in a number of different ways.
And there are certain core traits that are part of the creative person. And then there are some specific things that are more tied to the architecture world. But to a great extent, the creative person is an individual who has enormous belief in the foreground conclusion of his or her own reasoning. There is no discussion that this is the way it's going to be.
And so this sense of destiny that all things are going to come is scripted in everything that they do. In many of these architects were already masterful in the handling of the media because what the media does among other things is it patresses the authority of the proper name. And therefore that mobulizes capital and mobulizes fundraising and things like that. It's very difficult to have a patron to put money on a building that has an acronym.
I mean, unless it's an OMA, but even then they use them coolas, right? You need to have an individual with legs and a heart and a voice. It becomes the symbol of a particular way of being in the world and taking care of this particular project. And so there's something extraordinarily specific about the architectural enterprise.
But creativity in general is universally spread, possibly, that all of us have access to. And that is the other really overwhelming message which is so positive, so rich in consequences. All of us are more creative. We all are able to pick up a language, learn to walk, do imaginary play, and we progressively lose that capacity.
And the creative is somewhat kept a healthy relationship with that initial way of being in the world. I'd like to also ask then about how within the last 50 years, how the incredible changes in just the way psychological research is conducted and the tools at the psychologist's disposal of whether it's for studying brainwaves and actually having a neuroscientific angle to the psychological research or whether just the ethical standards have changed in such a way that would make it more restrictive to do studies like this. Could you speculate perhaps a little bit about how, if a study like this were to be done today, how kind of the basic tests would have differed? The very first Achilles heel of the study is that these architects were taken out of their natural setting.
We don't know how Aerocyanin was acting in his office. We actually know we have a lot of folks that were there who are still around, they can tell us. But a lot of the procedures, the testing, is done artificially, a kind of a lab condition. And when you are in the place where you actually have to display the traits that you have, you have a much higher chance to get a closer answer that is lasting and bearable.
In the context, for example, of the IPA study, we found some recordings about the group discussions. And these recordings were really quite extraordinary. One of them was the ethics problem. And the ethics problem was about the core, the interference of the client on the architect's judgment and expert knowledge.
So there is a client that has a huge project. The client is very happy with what the architect has done. However, there is one piece that needs to be changed and he can only be changed in a certain way. And the architect has tried as hard as he could to have him to change his mind.
But the client doesn't realize he's about to call. What are you going to do? You might lose the job if you don't do what he says. And at that moment, lots of things happen in the room.
In the session of Seren and Seren and said, we are dealing with this situation right now. And Phid Johnson said, oh, the one you told me about, yes, I'm going back on Monday and I have to deal with the client. So I'm saying it there is one thing to have us sitting next to Seren and confronting the client is another thing. Now you're seeing how he's doing it.
How he's using body language. What kind of a syntactic on cost is using. What kind of pace is using in his words. What is wearing.
Where this conversation is taking place. Is it in the office of the client's office is in a neutral place. All these are parts of the data set that would help understand his personality maker. So that's a limit.
Also, there is a profound skepticism today after the rise of science studies 20 years ago about the authority of the lab and the scientists. You know, you can create what we should go go regimes of truth by saying, oh, you know, if you eat carrots seven times a day, you're going to live 150 years old. And then you see that the whole industry of carrots become super rich. And then they realize two years later, no, actually we realize that carrots decrease life expectancy.
And then the whole character industry plungers. So science is not infallible. And that is further fuels the skepticism that octets would have in doing this because they, you know, at the time, they kind of have to do a lot of convincing to get the octets come out. And probably the most receivers against this was Philip Johnson, who was the most articulate by far brilliant in his rhetoric.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I'm not a big fan of his worker, but I think it is the intellectual finesse is truly admirable. And so he was fanning off the McKinan's argument.
And he said, I don't think it does anything at all to study this phenomenon, but they were able to reach some data. Also, you know, they could try to do this in a form of a survey. But I part self a data follow up survey twice after 20 years and after 25 years to see this is a long to doing studies to see if these folks were confirming the data that had been retrieved. And they did.
They were very vital. Those that were still in practice, making their 70s and early 60s. And the same temperament, they were trying to give a room to younger partners. But those didn't happen in the context of a three day weekend.
The researchers went out there and then they interviewed them. It was a much lower level of participation. So what singles out this study in such an extraordinary way was a level of intensity, the orchestration of it, the characters that came in. What they did after that, that the artists kept asking.
So what are we learning from this? And McKinan was still tentative about that. In this respect, what makes my book different from what McKinan would have written, which I'm sure I don't have a background in psychology. And the moment of the language is not there from a technical perspective.
But the basic concepts came across the repeatedly in the number of papers is that I could actually assign a proper name to a particular statement. And there's nothing profoundly embarrassing at all. These are wonderful moments of a confessional moments of realization of things that you do or what motivates you to do what you do. I found that there's something really moving, really profoundly touching at so many levels to hear the struggle of Louis Kahn to emerge from the conditions of his childhood was kind of a tearful moment.
There's a lot to be said about that. So I have tremendous admiration for these gentlemen who were able to keep up their demons, like all of us we have in some form, and make something beautiful out of their lives. Whether you like their work or not. But they put themselves at the driver's seat.
And that is a message that in a way, that's a message that the book ends. It's the courage. You have to have the courage to act on your intuition. Give yourself the credit to do the things that you want to do.
Act on it. So as a practicing architect, how did you first come across the study and decide to research it enough to write a book about it? So architecture works a bit like law. It's all about reference cases where we come from, what we have done.
And we either embrace it or react to it. But somehow we have a relationship with that past. So with Martin's have discovered, I, there was my thesis that you see that working on the artist's showman. I realized how enormous the participation of the project of modernity was.
And how much we do not know that we focus on 20 names, but there are 2000 names of people that were doing really wonderful work. One of the biggest falsity of architecture is that the works speaks for itself. But absolutely not. You can have a photography infrastructure of the work.
If you bump into the work, yes, but not that many people know all the work of Smith and Williams, which is phenomenal. And so many other parts of the United States. The North Carolina expanded up in reshaping the role of California, the California, in the project of California, Martin's. As I was doing North Carolina, I met Don Olson.
And Don told me about the study. And part of the reason why I do this as a practicing artist is because I constantly bump into this doubt, especially in California, we have this full embrace of modernity. We're caught into the vernacular of regionalism and the attachment of the land and the gold rush, agriculture and the barn and the shingles. I mean, there's a whole vocabulary that is largely tied to the set of references.
But California was an extraordinary economic force throughout the world. It has always been since its birth. And so the creative architect became an obsession because I said, you know, why would someone like Sam and who have finished General Motors and Johnson went on to see him? And they think, we'll come all the way to Berkeley.
They were losing money by the second. Why would they do that? Why would they care? And as I dug into it, there was so much richness into that.
So I could not let go. I actually spent almost 10 years with this material. The book was written in one year. But, you know, doing the research, going back to the archive, nagging people, like what's going on.
And also noticing the black faces of people that just couldn't quite understand what to do with this material. It was exotic and entertaining, but not structural to their interests. So circumstance has changed. I don't rap.
My much, sir, the senior editor, Monashali was the same as North Carolina. In New York, I showed him the material. He immediately understood what I was talking about and said this whole thing in motion. We brought in Brett McPherland and Josh Kaplan from the Bay Area.
We met and we were ready to go. And we did it. And that's what you have. It's such a great contribution to any, I think, any practicing architects library to have something that can keep referring to as the way that we measure these kinds of value characteristics, but also how they might change and how there's always going to be the untold stories of people that, for whatever reason, were left out of the historical dialogue.
And the conversation and based on the research and all the time you spent putting the book together, I'd like to hear if you have any advice for the average practicing architect, how they might work to maintain their own sense of creativity and encourage it throughout their own practice. You know, it will sound trite and maybe new agey, but just listen to yourself. Give more credit to your own intuition. Do not repress.
What could be and the least with serenity that lead into the unknown, the judgment is the worst, probably the most impactful, cluster of creativity. And it makes you think that whether or not we should have competition or awards because you're messaging, sending messages of defeat, but the endless exploration, this scooping from yourself, any possible ways of doing things is such a rich experience. You know, we choose architecture as one way of expressing that force, but that is everywhere. So I want to give credit to the individual to think in more benevolent terms about his or her own ability to do work that is meaningful to her and to others.
Thank you so much. Well, Pierre Luigi, sir, I know it's been wonderful to speak with you. And thank you so much for your thoughts on the book and creativity for architects. My pleasure.
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