Westweek’s Time for ‘Intuition and Reason’ : Designers speak out on the importance of each, or both, for inspiring their work.

“Intuition and Reason in the Design Process,” the theme of the 1989 Westweek conference, seemed to baffle many symposium speakers and their audiences.

“Only a fool or a genius would attempt to unravel the tangle of intuition and reason in making architecture,” declared Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa as he proceeded to try. Kurokawa shared a podium with French architect Jean Nouvel and Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta in a symposium on “Important Contemporary Directions in Global Architecture” at the Pacific Design Center.

Kurokawa suggested that reason represented the rational Western approach to design while intuition was Asian. Using slides of his own projects, such as the Hiroshima Museum of Art, the Japanese designer argued that his work represented a synthesis of West and East, logic and feeling, responsibility and freedom.

‘Rich Store of References’

“I call this fusion of influences ‘symbiosis,’ ” he said. “Working from a basis of my own Buddhist culture and background, I have symbiotically absorbed the influences of Europe and America into my soul.

“From this fertile fusion springs a rich store of references, which may sometimes seem irrational--such as the unexpected introduction of a sensuously curving wall of glass in a rigidly rectangular design.”

Nouvel argued that all that mattered was “doing the right building in the right place at the right time.”

Having said this, Nouvel immediately went on to favor reason over intuition. “I’m an unabashed Modernist,” he said, “and therefore, I believe in the rational ideology of form follows function.”

Chunk of Black Granite

And having made that unequivocal declaration, Nouvel showed slides of a range of work that often seemed thoroughly irrational and idiosyncratic.

His entry for the Tokyo Opera competition, for example, was a huge chunk of black granite with bulging sides covered with gold leaf. A symbolic door 50 feet tall sat over a narrow slot that was the actual Opera House entrance.

Challenged by Kurokawa, Nouvel retreated from his defense of the rational approach to design into a wry acknowledgment that “obsession outranks both reason and intuition.”

Legoretta, playing the role of the Mexican campesino he has elaborated into an engaging public manner, declared, “The best designers are reasonable fools.”

Hard-Eyed Romanticism

His slides of a stark and striking factory in a desert in northern Mexico revealed the hard-eyed romanticism that has made him famous.

“Architecture should make people feel happy,” Legoretta said. “It should be one long fiesta.”

For Italian architect Renzo Piano, the tension between intuition and reason was embodied in “the interaction between the individual designer’s sense of what is appropriate in a project and the collective nature of the way buildings happen.”

Piano, who has designed the proposed Newport Harbor Art Museum, shared a symposium on “Architecture for Southern California’s New Museums” with Getty Center for the Arts designer Richard Meier.

Shock at First View

Piano described this interaction in the evolution of his design for the Newport museum, outlining his own sense of the character of a major cultural building in Southern California, and then describing how this intuition was modified by the complex process of consultation with the museum’s board, curator and the surrounding community.

Meier described his shock on first setting eyes upon the spectacular hilltop Brentwood site for the Getty Center.

“ ‘My God, what is this place?’ I wondered. ‘What clues does this landscape and this program really give me in attempting to make a coherent design?’ ” Meier said. “In all that sky there seemed to be nothing to hold on to, except the San Diego Freeway.”

Searching for reason, Meier walked the hilltop many times, getting the feel of its confusing topography. Gradually, the design clues emerged--”intuitively,” he admitted.

Series of Symposiums

“I only hope the architecture makes sense when the center opens on Oct. 12, 1995,” he said with a laugh.

The seeming conflict between intuition and reason--”those terrible twins,” as one member of the audience called them--was examined in a series of Westweek symposiums that ranged across the spectrum of the design process.

Some examples: “Designing Textiles,” “Choices in Detailing in the Design of Interiors;” “Psychological Motivations in Residential Decorating;” “A Balancing Act in the Learning Process,” with educator Michael Gelb, originator of the High Performance Learning Method; “East Collides With West,” with graphic designer April Greiman, and “The Design of Artists’ Studios in Los Angeles,” with David Hockney and Ed Moses.

On a lighter level, the center’s showrooms displayed a range of office and domestic furniture, textiles, ceramics, bath and kitchen fittings and other items for interior decoration, in styles that ran from the outrageously kitschy through the disarmingly charming to the engagingly elegant.

Fit for Cleopatra

Baluchi Marble Ltd. offered a pink marble sunken bath fit for Cleopatra for $30,000. Brunschwig & Fils displayed draperies in ferocious florals at up to $30 a yard. Brian Flynn exhibited handmade ceramic designs for kitchens, fireplace surrounds and baths at $8 a tile.

Tavola International featured a string-and-ebony chair by the Danish design studio Hovelskov. Swiss manufacturer Swissform offered a line of office chairs named “Sulky” that were so technically sophisticated they seemed capable of launching their occupants into orbit. Harpers of Torrance mounted a display of sophisticated office furniture in a sleek showroom by Jerrold Lomax and Kaneko Ford Design.

The most moving, yet understated instance of the interaction of intuition and reason was embodied in the modest display of models of planned Los Angeles public buildings sponsored by the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission.

Titled “Pride in Civic Architecture,” the exhibit showed projects that illustrated the vast improvement in the standards of design of buildings proposed by local public agencies such as the Department of Water and Power. Buildings such as the Shatto Recreation Center by Steven Ehrlich or the Valley Distribution Headquarters in Van Nuys by Ellerbe-Becket are two prime examples.

When Westweek ended, the estimated 35,000 visitors may or may not have untangled the knot of intuition and reason in the design process to their own satisfaction. But judging from their tired but happy faces, most seemed to have had some exhausting fun in the attempt.