Rules for Production

In the reading “The Emergent Rules”, by Charles Jencks, one of the things he said about rules struck me. He said that “rules or canons for production are seen as preconditions for creativity, a situation caused partly by the advent of the computer, which makes us conscious of the assumptions behind a building” (281). In today’s society we are having to do less and less thinking because technology is doing it all for us. Our cell phones have our friend’s and family’s numbers plugged in as their names, we have GPS for our cars, we have computers that create images and ideas for us. We are rarely exercising our brains anymore and as a consequence we are becoming less creative.
This quote by Charles Jencks suggests that when doing building projects there are many rules to stick by. Obviously there are those that are required for safety and cost efficiency, but are some of the other rules being used to restrict the creativity of the designers? It seems that creativity is not as free now. I thought that one of the major points of building a building was to have it stand out from the others. Every building should stride to be different than the other, otherwise skylines and cities would be boring. Jencks also says, “the only escape from rule-governed art is to suppress from consciousness the canons behind one’s creativity-hardly a comforting liberation” (281). He seems to be saying that even though there are rules, the only way something brilliant is going to come out of an artist is if he ignores the rules and goes with his instinct. This seems to be the most logical explanation to me because without the great ideas of artists and designers that ignore the rules, the world would not be filled with exciting and beautiful architecture for everyone to appreciate.