Frances to Luis with thanks... Allow me to rant in reflection. It is agreed that humans are going to make raw buildings of some crude kind and use them as rough dwellings, at least for protection and survival. If such constructs are deemed architecture, and this act is held to be natural and innate and inborn, then architecture at its root core is an action that humans are driven to do, whether they like it or not. If anything is static in architecture it might indeed be the natural engrained tendency for humans to engage in the architectural act in the first place at all. The act would be a disposed bent or instinctive trait or inclined drift, toward which they would naturally lean, supposedly evolving in the purposive direction of a good end goal. The causal agent of this telic design however would not be some supernatural deity, but would be a natural tendency.
>From an anthropological and archeological stand, the first building as a dwelling presumably would have a vague familiar tone as an architectural quality or property, and would also be an original initial type, from which all other buildings to follow would be a derived unique token with the fundamental tone and of the normal type. It is interesting for me to note the pragmatist stand on this kind of phenomenal thing. Its theory of categories holds that to sense a tone or a type is to sense a token that stands for them; and to sign an icon or a symbol is to sign an index that stands for them; and to engage a quality or a law is to engage a fact that stands for them; so that a corporeal second is always needed to realize an ephemeral first and an ethereal third. This means that all action and to include life or sense or mind or thought is essentially brutal, but also energetic and dynamic. The ironic thorn here for me is that under pragmatism the first ever building made would have to be a token but with its own tone and of its own type, which may be a categorical contradiction. In framing a scientific approach to architecture, it seems that there might be three entities at work here, those being: (1) the tendency; and (2) the practice; and (3) the theory. The tendency would be the natural disposition and compulsion to design or build. The practice would entail the process and the project or the product, as well as empirical research and review. The theory would be a law or rule resulting from the observed facts of any practice. One thorn here is whether any or some theory need come before practice, even if the architect is primitive and the architecture is primal. It would seem to me that in the evolution of architecture an intelligent human mind must have come before the act of designing and building, because a dumb brute animal brain cannot be filled with the ways of architecture; otherwise nonhuman animals must be included as architects, which seems unacceptable. The caves and dens and hives and nests of animals are natural objects used to say instinctively live in, but tentatively they must be excluded as architecture, even though they have an ethological basis in suggesting some biological basis of human action. That animal basis and source here however would not likely be architecture. Finally, it seems that all humans act in much the same way, and all architectural constructs are much the same with some variation due to creation or invention or innovation or dictation in regard to say context. The differences in individual humans and in their particular constructs may be important to aesthetic and artistic or stylistic and historic inquiries, but are likely of little consequence to any philosophic and scientific theory of architecture. At some definite reduced point, all particular different individuals will be found to be essentially the same. This is a pragmatist rule of infinite iconicity and definite indexicity and indefinite symbolicity, which seems difficult for me to abandon. You wrote... Frances, I would imagine that most 'practitioners' of art and architecture primarily 'just do it' and are not hampered by a static conception of what they do. Each person brings a unique set of faculties to the task and each task is also unique leading towards non serial repetition. Think of it as a 'cognitive DNA recombination'. I am not trying to dissuade you from your inquiry, but this is an important issue that must be incorporated in your theory. Any static theory is doomed from the onset.
