Vaterstetten, Germany. Do you remember the first exercise you had to do in school? For me, it was the entry exam for children who were born after the cut-off date, to check whether they were mature enough for school. We were sat down in the newly built 1970s primary school building in Vaterstetten, and shown a series of edible items, apples, pears, plums, nuts, cherries, and the like. The question was, which of these items would not belong into this group, and the answer was, of course, the nut. I remember this test until today.
And I sometimes do the game “Where is the nut?” with my architecture students, when it comes to categorizing elements in order to clarify a design situation. Categorization is certainly one of the oldest and most fundamental intellectual operations.
When I studied in Singapore, our professor, David Chou, argued that every design problem could be approached by categorizing elements into “dense” or “disperse”. And actually, from regional planning all the way down to building construction, this approach is useful. So far, I have to admit, the simple “principle of dense and disperse” has always helped me finding my way out of complex design decisions.
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls for “Leitdifferenzen” as a method of sorting our modern days complexities. Well, such nouns are heavy. A much more agile, and more fun way to categorize – and thus question categories – is the art historian Ernst Gombrich’s “principle of ping and pong”. He instigated a game with his friends in which they had to take any pair of words and say whether it was “ping” or “pong”. Surprisingly, or not, the answers most often coincided.
Would you agree that the nut from my entrance exam for school is “pong” in an environment of “pings”?