ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a program began quite accidentally. It resulted from some erroneous predictions and a casual conversation. The freshmen architectural design class had been given the carving of a wood cube as a problem: in three weeks, using only jacknife, gouge, sandpaper, and linseed oil for the finish, complete a handcarving, working directly, in a six-inch wood cube. The major theme of the handcarving is the integration of mass and space. Carvings are usually assessed on this dimension. The first steps were having the handcarvings judged by independent raters and a re-examination of the data. In brief, people finally realized that the predictions had ignored the key issue in the handcarving, the integration of mass and space from the point of view of the complexity of the object itself. The “tension reduction” theory refers only to the frustrations in the student, the carver.
