Florida Ease

INTRODUCTION

In early morning house fire in December 1999 left us driving away in soot-stained clothing to look for a place to live. The house could be restored but had to be gutted, and we had to live elsewhere. After three temporary moves, Sue and I settled into leased transitional quarters to wait out the 15 months it would take to restore the house. During these 15 months, we ate out regularly, frequenting Italian bistros, as well as Japanese, Chinese, and vegetarian restaurants. Sue comes from an immigrant line of Jewish musicians and caterers and inherited a flair for critical kosher taste and for making gustatory distinctions over every slice and morsel of food.

 

Touting vegan food in a small health food store, Rich Landau was working in an apron and hairnet behind a small stove, making savory soups and imaginative sandwiches. We often sat in his three-table corner of the health food store, lunching and dining on organic sandwiches and his excellent soups as Sue praised Rich's vegan cuisine. We are not vegans or even vegetarians. We eat fowl and fish, but as Sue likes to say, we don't eat anything larger than ourselves. We bought curative herbs and homeopathic medicines from the health food part of the store to offset the effects of waking up in a burning house.

 

Munching on grilled portabella hoagies, I was about to begin a six-year association with this white-aproned vegan chef, whose art and cuisine would become noted and highly rated. In 2006, his two-story vegan cuisine restaurant in downtown Philadelphia (www.horizonsphiladelphia.com) was rated ‘3 Bells' and referred to as a Philadelphian "destination restaurant" in The New York Times.

 

In 2000, when Rich was beginning to grow his clientele and his reputation as a vegan chef, he moved into extra space in the health food store and opened his first restaurant. The health food store and Rich's restaurant were connected by an open passthrough. The ambiance was friendly, but the décor was conservative and almost staid. Rich would later refer to it as "grandmotherly."

 

In January 2001, our house was finally ready for occupancy, and we gratefully moved back into a house that had been completely redone, repainted, and refurnished with insurance monies. We answered our new front door that summer to find Rich standing at our doorstep. We thought it was a bit strange for him to show up suddenly and, of course, we were curious about his visit. He announced he was moving his business connected to the health food store three doors down from the store. He was going to open his own separate restaurant with the "open" kitchen he wanted. He was going to call it Horizons Café. He came with a straightforward deal.

 

"Can you make my new restaurant look like this, like your house?"

 

He meant colorful, with a sense of spaciousness, unusual but modest and inexpensive. We had taken pleasure in improvising our new décor (within the limits of insurance definitions of what they will pay for after a fire). Because the fire had destroyed all my work, I had created the art on our walls in the intervening 16 months. I call my improvisational art Bricolage after the French idea of the itinerant fix-it man, the Bricoleur, who invents what he needs to fix or make something from whatever happens to be around. This fairly describes what I do when I work creatively.

 

Rich grinned, "I don't have any money, but if you do the interior design, you can hang all your Bricolage art there."

 

He wanted ambiance, a touch of newness, a sense of something different, but on a limited budget. His place would be called Horizons Café to emphasize his innovative cuisine, particularly his use of grilled seitan and seared tofu to create exciting dishes.

 

Rich sat in our house, sharing his plans for having his own place and making his own free beginning, "I want my new place to be exciting, different in some way."

 

He looked around at our house filled with Bricolage pieces from my just completed sabbatical work, "Like this."

 

A cozy Vegan gourmet restaurant with a Bricolage gallery in our neighborhood? We took the project sight unseen, and although opening day was only seven weeks away, intuition was on our side.

 

This was an opportunity to "real world" test a Bricolage theory of improvisational composition. By "real world" test, I meant that providing a successful dining experience had real risk consequences for the business success or failure of Horizons Café. This risk profile came with interesting challenges. Sue and I were to create a public arena in which Bricolage pieces were part of a social dining event. Could we improvise a décor and enough pieces of original wall art within seven weeks, all resulting in a restaurant ambiance that would be part of Horizons' business success or failure? What would Rich's vision of a "destination" ambiance look like using the Bricolage improvisational process to interpret, visualize, and create it?

 

Rich laughed, "Somehow make it terrific without money right away." This was consistent with his creative approach to life. A straightforward guy, he is a food artist steeped in creativity. He is always eager to create even with almost nothing if necessary. Rich envisioned serving his gourmet menu of international vegetarian cuisine in a setting that helped produce an "elegant dining experience," an ambiance appropriate for dining on a meal designed with pleasure. An intense young artist, Rich was clear about where he was going, "I want Horizons to be thought of as a destination restaurant." That was six years before The New York Times declared that Horizons was a vegetarian destination restaurant in Philadelphia and after he married Kate Jacoby, who would become his dessert chef. His dream became a done deal in 2006.

 

"Challenges are what make life interesting," he says.

 

When he praises my Bricolage work, I tell him, "Hey Rich, I work with fluids and paint and shove them around on a surface while they slowly dry, but you work with fire and instant transformation. You have to work fast. I don't. My hat's off to you."

 

He smiles at that. We know we both improvise. Six years later at the new place downtown, now called simply Horizons, I said to Rich, "Horizons and Bricolage are simpatico and synergistic." We all agreed.

 

THE HORIZONS CÁFE PROJECT

After we agreed to Rich's plan and offer, Sue and I drove over to the pizza parlor to see what we had to work with. The front entrance to the box store looked like this:

Original Site, Willow Grove, PA

The Horizons Café project consisted of transforming a shoebox-shaped former pizza operation into something cool and interesting. The space was 50 by 100 feet, including a rear office and two bathrooms. When I first looked inside the facility, I muttered, "Holy shit, what have I taken on!"  The utilitarian "eatery" challenged conventional answers to transformation. A box is still a box, I thought before I let the resistive thought flow away.

Original Interior, Kitchen Front to Rear

The first challenge of the Horizons Café assignment was to project and gather feelings to visualize on the blank canvas that Rich offered up. He envisioned a tropical decor that would "make people think of being away." He tossed out carte blanche creativity notions, "make it part Caribbean, part Mediterranean, part Southwest, and make it so when people come in the door they say ‘Wow!'."

 

The project's second creativity challenge was money. The design and décor had to be produced from an illusion on bare walls. Limited to conventional flat wall painting, Sue and I had to transform a shoebox with color and graphic design. This flat wall painting was the only kind of refurbishing authorized by the landlord for Horizons Café as his new tenant. We could freely choose colors, but there would be no wall treatments, no handwork, and no budget for modifications, such as relocating light fixtures or outlets—only flat wall painting.

 

The third creativity challenge was urgency. The restaurant's opening was scheduled in seven weeks. Repairs and construction work to strip out the pizzeria's old take-out equipment and countertops and to organize the box into a new dine-in restaurant were already started. This work would be ongoing at the same time we worked to evolve our décor design and color scheme.

 

BEGINNING THE PROJECT

The Bricolage creative process begins by looking around and seeing what is interesting and what is not interesting in the immediate circumstances. We first assembled a realistic view of our options as refurbishing work by contractors working independently went along. The process of producing and gathering options advances as the Bricoleur recognizes whatever the environment offers, including scrap, trash, and broken things. Visual options arise and fade away as circumstances change. What was a good idea before a wall is painted pink may not be an option after. The act of gathering must be continuous because options drop and fade away, and new options are created from changes. Sue and I were visual bricoleurs. We were co-designers of the décor by making do with whatever was at hand each day, each in our own way and time.

 

Once inside, we were faced with the different angles and surfaces of a box. Angles, surfaces, corners, and abutments were all visual parts of our immediate circumstances. These were white and ripe for emphasis with color, shape, and line. The one unbroken, full-length wall featured a grey granite bump strip that wouldn't be removed. The offset narrow walls and corners framed the "open kitchen" in a corner looking out on a small dining environment. These were the physical circumstances in which we were to create an aesthetic experience with improvisational ardor and a shoestring budget. Synonymous with the creative attitude, we were optimistic and as always exploratory in spirit.

 

As the construction workers banged and sawed and pulled wires, Sue and I dropped in daily to look at the work being done, observed current conditions, and gathered visual impressions. We were alert to opportunities to give something a creative twist, something unforeseen and unplanned, something that was not there until an eye blink brought it up through intuition. This was playful and creative. We would quickly write the next color instructions on the walls, draw color placement diagrams on pieces of scrap wood, and then get out of the way of the half dozen workers. Putting the restaurant into operation was the main priority of all this activity. Decorative details and painting were patched in as the mechanical and the electrical and functional aspects of the kitchen were done first. The design of the improvisational process was pastiche, montage, collage, and bricolage all in a one roll. Gathering visual impressions of these changing work circumstances were the next steps for going forward and committing to our design decisions.

 

Rich had said "part this, part that, with some of that" in a kind of recipe for the way he plated his artistic creations and concocted his marvelous soups and his elegant dishes now featured in the city's main food reviews. Following our sense of his guidance, we built Horizons' color palette from Caribbean, Mediterranean, Southwestern "parts"—Tahitian Breeze, Fire Pink, Harbour Blue, Chartreuse, and Cassis, a deep plum—by flipping color chips into arrays of combinations.

 

"Ah. I like that one and this one together," someone would say.

 

Playing a game of chance in this way, we spontaneously assembled a colorful and powerful palette. We were mindful that this process was playful, but not "just play" because of its serious and real-world business consequences for Rich and Kate. We had to make choices and put them into action now.

 

Initially shocked by the bold palette, Rich asked skeptically, "Are you sure you want the ceiling painted Harbour Blue?" We had asked the painting contractor to paint the ceiling panels and their holding grid Harbour Blue. It is a deep, dark, low-register blue. Sue and I agreed that we did. Why did we agree? The dark blue ceiling over a light-colored floor would create a hovering surround; it would define interior space the way a cavern creates its surround. 

 

We added Harbour Blue arches on walls now painted in bold colors. The arches worked to visually draw the ceiling to the floor. As we developed the color and value inversion of the ceiling/floor, we began to work with the idea of creating a moveable sense of place by encapsulating it with space instead of walls. We didn't want diners to feel contained, as if in a box, but to experience a sense of spaciousness through color. We set about to create a network of visual experiences to capture the sense of plasticity, that is, to create the sense of aliveness we usually refer to as ease in a sedentary space. We wanted to elicit the sense of visceral ease. What a better way to prepare to dine than to sit relaxed while your gustatory sense is enlivened with anticipation.

 

The next step in visual improvisational composition is to switch from thinking to seeing, to make a switch from left-brain direction to right-brain absorption, to outwardly switch from squinting at things to looking around with a kind of idle ease. This switch defines what you look at and what you see. This switch is difficult because we are trained to look purposefully, to be looking at "something." We are taught that time spent noticing how some trivial scrap looks like a broken horse is for time-wasters, for daydreamers. We are taught that "time is money." I had seen the Mesoamerican fieldworker spend time like this, turning some small object in hand in various ways, seemingly without purpose. Yet this switch begins the intuitive process of improvisation. An environment contains all the paths necessary to optimize it, but like motion in any complex environment, all the potential options are best perceived and navigated with a consistent ease, thus not blocking any through using a least-action principle in combination with a least-resistance principle. The ease that comes from this combinatory use is necessary because the improvisational artist seeks to create full access to off-beat opportunities. Like turning a kaleidoscope, these possibilities arise with ease in the simple turning of ordinary circumstances to the improvisational composer. Engaging the senses by the suspension of thinking and placing cognitive activity in the backseat to ongoing experience are the prescient acts of the discovery behavior, which is at the heart of improvisation. The dual abilities to suspend ego direction and to work without planning are critical.

 

All conditions and materials are useful to the Bricolage artist in some as yet undetermined way. Improvisational composition is not about just doing anything, rather it's about finding new connections. "Picasso doesn't seek, he finds," he said. We have to grasp that we can see more than we know. Approaching circumstances through direct perception turns the power of observation into a flow, that is, we turn the act of perception into a moving visual behavior. The "seer" begins participating in environmental dynamics and not just into taking snapshots of midstream instances.

 

The direct perception of the features of circumstances connects us to nature's creativity and to its Taoist flow of aesthetic potential. The eye scintillates as context, figure, and ground glide unpredictably from perceptual organization to perceptual organization. With vision oriented to non-directed experience, the power of acting visually begins to yield juxtapositions in the reflections and flashes of looking around at how things are. Here, the ability to create value inversions by turning the ordinary upside down in the context of their circumstances is a critical perceptual skill. As the originality of making new connections is made visible, the Bricolage artist must be able to access these non-cognitive processes at will and at ease without becoming possessive.

 

PERSONAL BRICOLAGE

While Sue and I evolved Horizons' décor, I set about to improvise as many wall pieces as I could in seven weeks. I calculated the walls needed upward of 20 pieces. I didn't plan a design or sketch out a thematic development. Instead, I worked only with the overall sense that the pieces would be "part Caribbean, part Mediterranean, and part Southwest."

 

Everyday, as I prepared to begin my improvisational process, I noticed the urge, the pressure, to make something interesting, something eye-catching, something that would make people go "Wow!" When I felt the impulse to make something powerful, I knew from my sabbatical work that my intentionality was changing the compositional process. I knew that "wanting" to make something particularly "special" corrupted the integrity of the improvisational process. Coming immediately to my aid like active meditations, aphoristic guides to maintaining non-intentionality—such as "shame or fame, it's all the same" and "there are no mistakes"—leaped forward to reconnect me to the improvisational process. These guides to transcending social control release the primary power of the Id and evoke the flow of its nondiscretionary impulses. Repeating these mantras—reminders that the intentionality of social control seizes our every behavior—was necessary to displace the thinking ego from its executive position of judgment and command. It was necessary to distance the ego from the actions of non-intentional creativity.

 

Working without a budget, I turned to basic salvaging practices and gathered discarded articles from curbside trash for the source of my raw materials. I worked on velveteen jewelry display trays, broken mirrors, discarded plaster wall pieces, and framed prints spoiled by water stains. Whatever I found as I drove through neighborhoods during trash days became part of my compositional materials.

 

"Quick, honey," Sue was calling me from her cell phone. "There's a bunch of canvases in front of 1648 Hutchinson. It looks like they just now put them out on the curb."

 

I jumped in my minivan, drove across several townships and salvaged four large canvases, one of which, a 5-foot by 6-foot piece, I later bricolaged and titled Magic Mushroom. The four canvases, propped up between trash cans at the curb, were covered with spider webs. They spoke of the end of life. ‘Wendy E.' was the signed artist. I felt grateful to Wendy, although I had mixed feelings about picking through her discarded art. Her work looked like it had been taken out of a basement, where it had sat for years, and then deposited, sadly I'm sure, out on the sidewalk with other curbside trash. She had probably passed away.

 

Two weeks later while driving around, I again fortuitously ran into another batch of curbside canvases. I sat in my van and watched a frail, elderly man, white-haired and wearing a thin, faded shirt, walk slowly down his driveway and feebly place a final canvas among the others at the curb. This time, they were clean, medium-sized canvases by ‘Jean W.' I sent blessings to Jean, feeling predatory as if snatching away the old man's dead wife within minutes of her demise, "While the body's still warm," as folks say. Artwork by Wendy and Jean are still visible in what used to be their canvases. Their work still peeks through the layers of my Bricolage work. I like to think they honor the Bricolage pieces with their presence. "There are no mistakes," I repeated as I loaded Jean's canvases.

 

I was preparing my sense of values, of what is important and of importance itself, for originality to emerge. I had to be prepared for whatever emerged, interesting or not, painterly or not, useful or not, in order to capture originality moving about in its paradoxical conditions. One enters a universe in which there are no mistakes, only circumstances and a psychic space turning in endless flow. The emergence of originality came from my ways of not-knowing as I composed my painting actions non-intentionally and in this way approached originality through the principle of least resistance. "Put your ego aside and move with ease," I instructed myself.

 

Using latex paint leftovers from the Horizons wall paint colors I improvised freeform designs by slathering the paint on these discarded, somewhat damaged canvases and other non-traditional grounds, such as house siding samples and foam board. I restricted myself, budget-wise, to the café colors available. Partial half-gallons of semi-gloss latex from the "lo-hide" Horizon's palette were my major paint supply since these were available to me without cost. "Making do with whatever is," went my mantra.

Note: In an attempt to place the creative process in a real-time context,
the following description is written in present tense.

It is summer and I'm moving in and out of my mixed workspace—inside the garage and outside on the backyard grass, doing, doing, and moving in and out—often a brush is at hand, often one is not.

 

Following the imperatives of free improvisation (no planning, no direction, no intentionality, no time...nothing but psychic space), I lay out as many as ten pieces at once, from canvases to large cardboard pieces, and work on them simultaneously for as long as a sequence of motions continues to express a particular compositional action. This unshaped process is grounded in a visual rift. I am watching myself move and noticing how color and fluid shapes intermingle. A "pour" method emerges as I do this. It's something I can do while I'm moving. This emergence of a method is born from taking the least-effort direction. Rather than take time to decide what I want to do, I do what I can and improvise on the fly by pouring paint as I go in and out. An entire compositional riff ensues in which various ways of working with "pour" deploy in various rhythmic patterns across a half dozen splashed canvases. Musical analogies to Jazz are always appropriate, but the three least-cause principles I use are multimodal, synergistic, and synaesthetic, here deployed through visual rather than auditory ambiance. Jazz hears Bricolage and Bricolage sees Jazz.

 

The day is hot and I'm working with several bottles of drinking water at hand. I'm now working outside with the array of canvases and other materials lying on the back lawn. I have several small pieces on my one work table. I'm dressed in shorts and sweating. I spread my canvases on the grass, moving them so I can walk between them. Wendy is here with her large pieces. I toss Jean's pieces haphazardly on each side of Wendy's larger pieces with stepping space around them. The clipped grass, outlining the array of canvases and their various themes, gleams like a green arabesque between them.

 

Adding contrast, color, or form (all non-figurative) as I go along, I run out of paint and turn to a can near at hand. It's a different color, but I can reach it without delay and keep going. The principle of least-action guides my movement. My color sense may ask for a light blue, but that would require opening two cans and mixing them to arrive at the right tint. I don't pay attention to my thoughts about my color sense and their words fade as if I were walking away from someone talking. I walk by several pieces on my way to a farther piece and squirt them with water from my drinking bottle as I go by. Following the least-effort principle, I instead throw the paint in hand on the painting surfaces, allowing it to mix into various shades and tints, shapes and curves, as the accidental relations created by the "throw" suggest. I'm using the same Bricolage improvisational process of discovery, but now I am guided by three principles of visual action used to locate and navigate paths in undetermined environments.

 

From these basic formless but active surfaces, I carve out accidental forms and shapes, now a tropical island here and a desert landscape there, all emergent from the dynamics of disorder. I carve with spray enamel, tape and brush, palette knife and more paint, slashing across and through the fluid imprimatura kept alive with water and varnishes. Vases, plates, and exotic flowers appear everywhere. I see Jean's fabric construction turn into a gleaming portrait, and one of Wendy's large action-art pieces turns into Morning with Wendy. With a boa for a scarf, she is sitting nude on a stool with her naked back turned toward the viewer.

PROJECT ENDINGS AND DESIGN THEORY

When the refurbishing of Horizons Café was finished and all the construction trade workers packed up and gone, the kitchen stocked, and the booths, tables, and chairs in place three days before opening day, Sara and Jill (two wait staff), Sue, Jay (the dishwasher), and I hung 23 Bricolage pieces selected from the 44 that I had improvised on the back lawn in the intervening seven weeks.

 

 

 The Long Wall with Granite Bump Strip and Magic Mushroom

Encouraging customers to lounge at tables long after meals are finished is not in the best interests of a profitable restaurant. A restaurant owner needs to maximize seating by providing a satisfying meal eaten in a reasonable time, thus "turning over" seating capacity regularly. We wanted to shorten this time frame, yet heighten the experience within it. We wanted to design the diner's experience of time.

 

The concept of "designed time" as an experience arises from a new architectural discipline, Experiential Design, pioneered by Jon Adams Jerde, FAIA, and his architectural firm, The Jerde Partnership International, Inc. (www.jerde.com). "The primary focus," Jerde writes about Experiential Design:

"is not an object, but time itself. It's designing what happens to people in time, in a place. Fantasy about place is a primary perceptual method by which people form a bond with their home. Successful urban concepts will deliver on the promise of a positive fantasy in a real way" (Visceral Reality, The Jerde Partnership International, L'Arca Edizioni, 1998).

But Experiential Design is an architectural concept for people bodily moving about in an environment, such as pedestrian traffic in downtown environments. Conversely people in a restaurant will be obviously sitting down with intent to be sedentary for the duration of their dining experience.

 

When Rich said to us that he wanted his clientele to have an "elegant dining experience," we understood he meant the obvious—dining at ease in a physically enjoyable ambiance harmonious with seeing, smelling, tasting, chewing, and eating gourmet food. We were to provide a concrete multi-sensory, aesthetically pleasing experience appropriate to savoring gourmet vegan cuisine. "Ambiance" was interpreted, given the candlelit tables and booths that Kate and Rich ordered up, to mean "how people experience time while dining in soft light." Associates who have followed Jerde's innovative direction write about ambiance:

"More than mere architecture, Jerde's designs evoke a deep sense of identity and enable rich social dynamics. Once immersed in one of his created places, it's impossible to be a mere passerby. Each individual becomes part of the scene, both contributing to the experience and, in turn, taking away an indelible memory of the encounter" (Strategic Horizons LLP, 2001).

The sense of presence and place, of visceral involvement from a sedentary position, is achieved through heightened visual behavior stimulated by enhancing color and line through layering them in a design. Instead of foot traffic, the person visually "moves around" in the environment. The layered visual environment stimulates improvisational perception. We provided this stimulus by evoking involuntary eye movements, like blinking or noticing out of the corners of one's eyes, and by inducing directionless looking among incomplete architectonic and ecological visual pathways. We wanted people to look around, to see colorful difference everywhere, with the feeling they were sitting at the loci of a sense of place. Sitting in this centered presence, the meal unfolds as the heart of their experience while they dine.

 

It is a common observation that the experience of time is variable. Thus one forkful may feel like an endless delicious chew but lead to the discovery that one's plate is emptied; or 15 minutes of lively conversation may feel as entertaining as an hour of talking, and the time spent waiting for table service may suddenly feel brief and surprisingly well spent. One can forget that time is passing and not hear time ticking from every corner as we usually do. Our objective was to create the emotionally plastic feeling of time well spent, a visceral ambiance blurring the persistent and conventional presence of chronological time. At this aesthetic level of experienced ease, of relaxed alertness, time itself uncurls and becomes the plasticity of dream experience, the theta state of right brain engagement. To me, these are Mayan ways, the ways of Mayan perception in complex environments, even one contained like a terrarium in a box.

 

Hans Hoffman said that if a painting is going to have magic in it, the process must have magic in it. An improvised piece of perception carries with it the inherent originality of its compositional approach by stimulating a sense of plasticity as a visceral reality (the feeling of freedom and spaciousness in the seat of one's experience). The experience of feeling "present," the visceral sense of "being there," can clearly, even magically, change the viscosity of time's experience from one of linearity into one of an expanding, multi-sensory, waveform experience. This is the theta brainwave state. The challenge was to come to grips with this experiential concept of time and to create a sensory dimension for it to strum its many ways among many people, yet at the same time to maintain the compositional integrity of the improvisational approach of non-intentionality. We "wanted" this but we didn't "want" it. You see the paradox.

Color location in Horizon's modest environment became asymmetrical, non-rhythmic. It was also amiable, the colors easily yielding to other colors. These easy perceptual glides create inducements to visual movement, to an active looking around to see what one can see. Jerde International states:

"We connect to the visceral by orchestrating the level of drama, the balance between active and quiet space, the variations of light—dappled or rhythmic or brilliant, and color—saturated or faded, neon-bright or as subdued as a watercolor. Together these make unique sensory and emotional experiences."

The optical level of drama in the Horizons Café project was orchestrated by introducing ambiguity into many visual gestalts that suggest, imply, and provide what Escher called "glides," that is, visual pathways among incomplete yet interlocking forms with alternating patterns of the familiar and the strange. Glides allow the eye to move between and among perceptual juxtapositions, including unique contradictions, with a guided ease. The optic effect of color field saturation and discontinuous segmentation is a pixeling effect that also induces involuntary eye movement. The eye moves in visual behavior from one richly painted plane with distinct edges to "discovering" another figure/ground gestalt to which it is connected, sometimes by something as fugitive as contrast. This theta-based visual behavior is a perceptual, non-cognitive process that emerges as direct participation in a color field dynamic. The more deeply engaged one is in visual behavior, the more time expands to experience it.

 

The level of abstraction in the environment (stylization of concepts, e.g., arches as minimalist hard-edged silhouettes) prevents attempts to anchor one's eyes by searching for something familiar and stymies the need for representational perception, thus continuously inducing the eyes to engage in active discovery of paths to unsuspected new forms. The inability of the eye to find other than a transitory focus unhinges perceptual fixedness, bathing and re-immersing the diner's visual behavior in color field dynamics. A person feels relaxed, at ease yet alert, the effect of which is to make the individual feel a participant in the ambiance. In this way, the individual diner engages in improvisational and compositional visual behavior while sitting casually. Speaking about the American shopping mall prototype, Jerde International announced:

"We adapted it by adding new elements that didn't disturb its function, but instead added moments of surprise and excitement. We created a magical quality utilizing intensity and activity; at our projects senses are stimulated. But at the same time we preserve a comfort level, encouraging in our users a willingness to explore. Elements of the practical and the magical co-exist and enhance one another."

The experience of visual discovery, of unexpectedly finding the familiar, as diners visually browse the environment is not only a collective experience, but, asserts Jerde, "The communal experience is a designable event."

 

We followed Jerde's lead, but without a budget and confined to a boxed space hardly large enough to make a spacious shoe store, we simply made do.

Horizons Café was launched and I returned to my studies, in this case, how to think about Bricolage creativity. I wanted to teach my doctoral students how to conduct interdisciplinary research using Bricolage-based improvisational methods. In a cognitive form, this kind of bricolage is called connectionist thinking. As it has been often said, if you want to really learn something, teach it to someone else.

 

After five years of operating Horizons Café, Rich and Kate made the move to downtown successfully (www.horizonsphiladelphia.com). The new décor is elegant and upscale. The service is friendly and patient. The food glows on your plate in the soft light. Improvised for the different ambiance, new bricolage pieces hang there also. And most brightly, Kate and Rich now have a child by the name of Rio. ■