On a flight into Phoenix I was thinking of light as a metaphor for ideas. I thought of the city lights as a field of minds in a network of shared ideas. As I found my way to Taliesin West in northeast Scottsdale, memories ebbed and flowed with the illumination of the roads that, at each turn, gave way to an experience that embedded itself in my personal map of this metropolitan area in the Arizona desert.
There is always a moment before reaching Taliesin West at night where city lights disappear. Suddenly suspended in the darkness of the desert, I turned on my inner light—my knowledge of the place that has been embedded in my memory through living at the camp where Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered the principles of Organic Architecture. Slowly, the camp reveals itself through deliberate lighting, as ideas to be contemplated. I walked through this silent masterpiece, listening to the old ideas and observing the potential ones to come from Minding Design, a symposium on neuroscience, design education, and the imagination.
Last November the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and School of Architecture hosted this full day symposium, bringing together the ideas and research of architects and neuroscientists in a series of presentations and panel discussions. Juhani Pallasmaa, Michael Arbib, Jeanne Gang, and Ian McGilchrist were the keynote speakers in a dialogue that explored the opportunities of cross-pollination between architecture and neuroscience. The range of discussions was impressive and left my mind saturated with seeds of light/ideas and questions to contemplate and assimilate into my own design process.
