Ordered Surprise

Definition

Goldberger's term for the quality that distinguishes a living architectural composition from a banal one: the combination of convention and invention in which what is unexpected is also felt to be "right." Order alone becomes "a source not of comfort or serenity but of banality," and "when every element is predictable… the result is boredom"; but novelty without order is chaos. The best buildings — Alberti's Santa Maria Novella, Sullivan's Owatonna Bank, Jefferson's pavilions at the University of Virginia, the crown of the Chrysler Building — give "not just unexpected but right" surprises that "expand our sense of what harmony can mean." Goldberger's summary definition of the balance all architecture must seek is "to be both familiar and new, to provide both pleasure and serenity, order and novelty, intensity and repose, somehow managing to make you feel both equilibrium and a sense of revelation, all at once." The concept gathers Venturi's "less is a bore" and his defence of "messy vitality over obvious unity" together with Rudolf Arnheim's account of balance and Steen Eiler Rasmussen's visual dialectic of hard/soft and heaviness/lightness.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — formulates ordered surprise as the criterion of compositional success.
• Robert Venturi — "Less is a bore"; an architecture of "richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning."
• Rudolf Arnheim — the horizontal as "plane of action" and the vertical as "plane of vision"; balance as the core of perceptual life. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Steen Eiler Rasmussen — the visual dialectic of hardness and softness, heaviness and lightness, solid and void. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• beauty — the domain ordered surprise qualifies and refreshes.
• proportion — the classical order that ordered surprise interrupts or extends.
• architecture-as-object — composition as the object's internal balance.
• taste — the judgment by which surprise is assessed as right or merely odd.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 3 (pp. 82–86) develops the concept from Arnheim, Venturi, and a set of canonical facade examples.

Open Questions

• If surprise must be judged "right" rather than merely new, is the criterion still perceptual, or does it smuggle back the authority of convention that Venturi attacked?
• Can ordered surprise be produced at urban scale, or is it necessarily a property of the single composition?