ABSTRACT
Written from Vesely's more than thirty years’ experience as a teacher of design, the essay asks what is the organism into which the largely hypothetical architectural designs are inserted, and therefore what is the nature of the design imagination. In many respects this sort of activity can be regarded a part of urban self-understanding, since ‘the unique characteristic of urban configurations is their ability to support more articulated strata of culture, social, and political life, as well as arts, literature, theatre and the communicative nature of everyday life’. Taking the typicality of situations, and their embodiment of the phenomena of horizon and institution, as the basis for maintaining creative continuity with an existing city, Vesely discusses, for example, how the problem of making visible the required indirect knowledge is achieved through metaphoric drawings (as against the effort to transform the city into the explicit knowledge that often comprises ‘planning’). The most important task at present, and the meaning of architecture, resides in the creation of the conditions for a possible public life.
