Background illustration by Lilli Carré.

The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

In this installment we hear from Ricardo Lledo Souto. Ricardo is a New York based designer currently studying at Columbia's Advanced Architecture Design Masters Program. 

There is no way to measure the extents to which an idea is able to take a hold of our minds. In 'The Discovery of the Unconscious,' Henri Ellenberger describes the state of stupefaction that takes over an Amazonian village when a case of demonic possession is identified; what in western medicine would be considered a physical condition: manic-depressive symptoms or paranoid schizophrenia, and treated individually with oral medication, in these isolated cultures possessions become an affliction that transcends not only the body of the person but it can spread to the rest of the villagers as well. Demonic possessions can be transferred from one person to others (with identical symptoms) if, in the exorcism ritual, it is collectively perceived that the shaman wasn't able to properly dispel a spirit from this realm. In some other cases, seemingly simple curses like forbidding a person to eat a fruit that was banned by previous generations can lead to death by natural causes in a manner of days even if the ingestion was done accidentally (like drinking water from a vase that had been used to collect said forbidden fruits.) In which cases, the treatment isn't done with medicine, but in a communal ritual in which the villagers ask the spirits for forgiveness on behalf of the cursed one. If the forgiveness is given, the person's physical symptoms disappear instantly. If the ritual fails, the person is condemned to die alone.

In cultures that have a more sophisticated intimation with ideas, the amount of control we allow them to have over us has continually marginalized. It seems irrational that our minds could have the power to kill us over a spell. However, in our own way we are still as much a victim of our minds' underlying processes even if we don't realize it. The medical term 'pseudocyesis,' for example, is reserved for cases in which the belief of expecting a baby is able to transform a body and manifest all the symptoms of a pregnancy without the presence of the fetus itself. Ideas like these come and go in and out of our minds and affect us without our conscious control, a concern that has been attracting contemporary philosophers and neurologists alike. Namely: Do we choose what thoughts appear in our mind?

...we have no control over what we think, we are witnesses of our own mind.

In the essay series: The question concerning technology, Martin Heidegger's meditations on our coming into contact with ideas antecedes science by many decades and shined a light on creative thinking from a totally original perspective. He described ideas as being 'revealed' and humans as being conduits by which extra-conscious processes manifest themselves into this world. In this sense, ideas are not selected by the author, but the other way around. In contemporary neuroscience, a parallel with these metaphysical abstractions has been concretized in experiments that show an astonishing discovery. There is a time difference between the moment a brain is exposed to stimuli or makes a decision and our conscious perception of these. Simply put: our brain is activated seconds before we are aware of it. What this means is that we have no control over what we think, we are witnesses of our own mind.

In the practice of architecture (or any practice that depends on creative thinking), all of this information has been intuitively incorporated into the learning process. Architecture educators understand we need a trigger, a source of interest that lays outside our minds that we can use as a stepping stone to learning a way to project our own ideas outwardly. That's why, especially in the beginning semesters, it is encouraged to distort an already existing object or to embody the ideas of other thinkers as a way to distill our own creative voice. Even fully formed architects don't exempt themselves from this initiation ritual -at first, I did Raphael Soriano and Harwell Harris. You've got to have a role model, then move on- confesses Frank Gehry. Imitation is a kind of possession. It is an essential part of learning our craft, and copying is encouraged explicitly for beginners. Robert Venturi states - There is nothing wrong with being influenced, or even with copying. Imitating is how children learn.

The problem of copying as a way to develop our work, however, is when we don't reach any point of abstraction. It is understood and encouraged to copy, but the effort has to eventually be imbued with our own interpretation; otherwise, it becomes plagiarism. In this sense, deliberate plagiarism denotes not only an unethical act but an intellectual deficiency. With the overwhelming availability of architectural resources in sites like archdaily, suckerpunch, pinterest, google images, instagram profiles, and even architects' webpages, there seems to be an imminent risk for indiscriminate plagiarism to contaminate our profession. It's the concern of other thinkers, however, that the problem won't be plagiarism itself but the stagnation of our capacity to think critically. Hernán Díaz Alonso establishes a distinction between the terms 'density' versus 'depth': he argues that the availability of architectural resources produces density, but it is the role of the individual to transform 'eye candy' into real knowledge. 

The problem of copying as a way to develop our work, however, is when we don't reach any point of abstraction. It is understood and encouraged to copy, but the effort has to eventually be imbued with our own interpretation; otherwise, it becomes plagiarism.

On the other hand, there are no real legal ramifications for plagiarism in our profession. Norman A. Coplan, the legal counsel to the New York State Association of Architects Inc., says, ''You can copyright a product, not an idea.'' Copyright protection laws have primarily helped architects whose clients have wanted, without the architects' approval, to re-use plans from one building on a second or those architects whose clients have wanted to retain the use of plans while switching to a second architect, and even in this blatant reuse of intellectual property, the amount of information that was used has to be demonstrated to be 'substantial,' according to the NewYork Times.

So what hopes do we have for our intellectual property not to be indiscriminately appropriated by other practitioners? We have to understand first that the moment our work becomes public, it will be accumulated into a universal database that can reverberate in other people's minds without their being able to control it. An image that we post on the internet can take a hold of a subconscious part of our brain and manifest itself in a project without us really knowing where it came from. 

However, it is important to be aware of this particularity of our own minds to get ahold of others' ideas so that we consciously move on to learn to abstract, to interpret, and in this process distill our own voices. Simply put, the way and amount we copy has to be deliberately judged by ourselves first. Even more simply put - smart people will make the right call- remarks Hernán Díaz Alonso - and stupid people will do what they always did, which is copy -. Our work will ultimately be judged by our colleagues, they will be the ones who'll respect us for our creative effort, or, just like a cursed villager in the Amazon, condemn it to die alone.