Demolition
learning experiences that recognize the power of taking things apart
Photo: Ernie Bowen, “Demolishing Hoffnung’s building, Pitt Street, Sydney”, in “Home and Away”, State Library of New South Wales
What is demolition but a path to creativity? “To transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations”, so the dictionary defines creativity. The artist Joan Miro made it his life’s work:
““The only thing that’s clear to me is that I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have an utter contempt for painting. The only thing that interests me is the spirit itself, and I only use the customary artist’s tools – brushes, canvas, paints – in order to strike more precisely. The only reason I abide by the rules of pictorial art is because they’re essential for expressing what I feel, just as grammar is essential for expressing yourself.” ”
Demolition is a creative act. It’s a cliché as old as the Hindu god Shiva, destroyer and creator, imagined into existence in the turbulence of 350 CE India. In any case, all you defenders of the status quo, conservative legions resting on your laurels, champions of don’t change a thing and believers of incremental adjustments take note: sometimes it’s already broken, and sometimes it simply needs to be dismantled, either to understand how the damn thing works or to cannibalize the parts and create something of a higher order. Most important is to demolish barriers of thought, constructs of understanding, and rituals of mind: to understand or to free the mind of cumbersome “shoulds” in order to create anew.
Monarchs need their jester, solutions seek their problems, and positions wilt without detractors. Creativity demands it’s opposite as well: demolition of the status quo. I loved to dismantle mechanical devices as a child. Tearing apart vacuum cleaners, bicycles, motors and watches was intriguing work, (and reassembling them less so). In fact, I’m pretty sure I never succeeded in fixing anything, never mind creating something vital and new. What I did learn, upon finishing a reconstruction only to find leftover parts, was to diagram my explorations and keep screws and bolts in a container so that they didn’t get lost.
A more precocious child might have learned more from the exercise. As it is, this child grew to enjoy dismantling preconceptions and clichés in order to see the world or his problems or his projects differently.
The point of demolition is to transcend the cliché. In our architectural practice we have a convoluted but dearly held process, the first 4 steps of which we diagram like this:
We found that our first ideas in tackling a project inevitably disappointed. They responded to the problems we needed to solve, but usually did so in uninspiring, well-worn ways. Our early solutions repeated what we knew, and usually failed to advance the solution beyond this limited perspective. We came to believe that the only solution to our timidity and dissatisfaction was to blow up whatever we first imagined.
How do we do this? We don’t plant bombs, or take a hammer to anything or even so much as crumple a sheet of paper. Instead, we ask questions, hurl insults, plant big smudgy X marks over the stuff we despise, decry what bores us, and finally after we’ve gotten all that out of our system, begin to imagine what would be better. Demolition makes space for a new and more profound conception.
In essence, having solved the problem first posed by our clients, we throw a tantrum and define for ourselves the problems we want to solve in addition, and for ourselves. We seek an elusive satisfaction without which we will not inspire our clients but that first demands jumping the rails of mind. Adam Grant in his book Originals (2016, p. 7) put it succinctly: “The Hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists . . . The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place”.
We’ve found that our clients too seek to transcend their problems and find something inspiring in the results. Solving their problems is never really the issue at all: it is just where the conversations, and the questions, really begin. Asking questions: this is the job of demolition. Question after question, the endless “why” of a toddler, until something gives way and a new perspective opens, a different angle of attack.
Question: Do you have the patience to encourage endless whys and expand the opportunity for inquiry?
Question: Asking “why” is easy and even lazy. How do you move your students into action and the hard work of actual inquiry?
I took a sculpture class at Cornell University once, in which we were required to take a single sheet of plywood and make something of it. When I took a sledge hammer to the plywood instead of a band saw, when I understood the rules but subverted an assumption in order to create a more visceral expression, this was when I first understood the beauty and possibility of demolition. The power of that act could be measured by the expressions of alarm in teacher and students alike.
Let’s celebrate subversion and disruption for their role in Creativity, instead of sending it immediately to the principal’s office. Let’s stop nurturing sheep just to maintain order and keep the school tidy. Before we do however, let’s carefully distinguish demolition from destructiveness. Destructiveness is the opposite of Constructiveness – “serving to build or improve”. Destructiveness lacks precision, plan and constructive purpose. It focuses on the subject, the wrecker. Demolition is the science and engineering of safely and efficiently tearing down. It is everything Destructiveness is not: careful, curated and constructive in intent. It focuses on the object, the impediment, the wrecked. Erich Fromme (1942, p.157) offered some insight into the destructive personality during World War 2, writing:
“It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansive-ness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities.”
We might all heed our collective responsibility, then, to build an expansive culture around our students: one that encourages the development and expression of all of their sensual, emotional and intellectual capacities.
Question: What does that mean to you, “an expansive culture”, and what might you do to develop it?
We might learn to honor our kill as well. There is an ethics to demolition, including an attitude of respect and intention, an investment in understanding not just what you demolish but the role it plays in a broader context, and a care in execution that minimizes or eliminates waste. Demolition inevitably disrupts systems, and inevitably risks unintended consequences. It requires Systems Thinking. We might learn something from traditional Native-American hunting ethics and morality, which places killing in both an ecological and an epistemological system (Reo, 2010). Understanding the system before disrupting it is a lesson in this culture long overdue.
We live in an age of accelerations and thrive on disruption. Playful subversions make the world go round. New possibilities emerge from challenging rules and transcending assumptions. Let’s get students to break the stranglehold of Judgement and then break the rules, then show them how to do so constructively. Let’s acknowledge and appreciate the beauty and wisdom and inevitability of both systems and their disruption.
Let’s also acknowledge that in Demolition we epitomize the psychology of life itself, situating ourselves between angst for what may come and nostalgia for what we may lose. What better way to encourage appreciation for the now? Let’s recognize that Creativity demands some demolition of the self. The real impediment to creativity is what Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers (1986) at Stanford Business School called the VOJ: the Voice of Judgement. We are our own impediments, meticulously constructing our own barriers of thought. Demolition might focus first on breaking the stranglehold of our own limited sense of right or good or promising. Ray and Myers offered a number of strategies to subvert the VOJ, including exercise, yoga, meditation, constructive self-talk, articulating our self-imposed excuses to highlight their weakness, and even addressing the VOJ directly…literally telling it to shut up. We are so often admonished in life to think critically, that we lose our appreciation for the cost in creativity and curiosity. By exorcising judgement, we reopen pathways to invention.
Question: How might you communicate to your students the importance of acknowledging self-judgement and the strategies for overcoming it?
Question: How might you illuminate in your curriculum the synergy between ethics (following what is “right”) and creativity (demolishing and replacing what is “wrong”)?
This is how to teach creativity: as an operation in both critical and generative thinking to both change the world as well as the self.
References
Fromme, E. (1942). The Fear of Freedom. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Grant, A. (2016). Originals, How Non-Conformists Move the World. Viking.
Miro´, J. (1992). Selected Writings and Interviews. Edited by M. Rowell. New York: Da Capo Press.
Reo, N. J. & Whyte, K. P. (2010, December 1). Hunting and Morality as Elements of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Human Ecology. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1739805
Ray, M. & Myers, R. (1986). Creativity in Business. Doubleday.
Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!