Cognitive and emotional elaboration of architectural visual incongruities, and their aesthetic appreciation

Over the last twenty years the architectural field has seen the development of the so-called “Deconstructivism”, showing a great tendency to break the rules regarding regularity and symmetry, right-angles, vertical and horizontal planes. These aspects had been proposed and tacitly accepted for centuries, becoming the prevailing compositional rules up to modern times (with a peak in neoclassical architecture) and characterising a great many public and private buildings; with some exceptions which, as anomalies, have become a great tourist attraction. Modern buildings following the new trend show conspicuous examples of perceptual incongruity. This visual property, with its emotional repercussions, constitutes its most salient feature, regardless of the usual philosophical references and of the rationalisations accompanying the designs at a theoretical level.The taste for incongruity is found both in the blueprints and in the final constructions, including examples by Frank O. Gehry, located in Europe or in the United States; or buildings, such as the UFA multiscreen cinema here in Dresden, designed by Wolf Dieter Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and associates; or works by Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Adid, Bernard Tshumi and others (Papadakis, 1994; Thiel-Siling, 1999).Continuity and novelty aspects, with respect to previous relatively incongruous buildings, have been carefully evaluated; and more in general, speaking of incongruity, we should quote Bruner & Postman (1949), Berlyne (1960), Venturi (1966).From a psychological standpoint, we found it interesting and useful to demonstrate the possibility of modifying – through appropriate verbal messages transmitted to beholders – the intensity of the perceptions of incongruity and their possible anxiety arousing power. These studies derive from previous investigations which had shown the possibility to manipulate perceptual incongruity and its correlates, by using verbal explanations which reduced the degree of “open conflict” when perceiving paradoxical configurations; or, depending on their content, managed to accentuate the conflict if this was initially “latent” (Bartoli, Biasi & Bonaiuto, 1989). Similar results there also obtained with non-verbal messages (colours and symbols).In the last experiment, the conflict-reducing procedure based on written verbal descriptions was applied with observers involved in examining slide projections of large full-colour pictures of two very incongruent buildings: the Dresden UFA multiscreen cinema just mentioned and the two parodoxical towers of Prague. Comparisons were made of the resulting effects of fitting interpretations and appropriate explanations, or of extraneous texts or even the absence of explanations.