ISSUE 94/

A BULLETIN FOR
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OPINION / Creativity

Creativity is Everywhere

💬 Amanda Levete

Some years ago, I went to a lecture by the late Peter Rice. He was a brilliant engineer responsible for the Sydney Opera House and the Lloyds building in London. He talked about an essay by W. H. Auden on Shakespeare’s Othello. Auden argued that Iago - the play’s antagonist - was the prototypical scientific man.

Rice went on to describe the dangers that architects and engineers face “by being merely pragmatic, using only rational thought, desperate to know whether what we do is right - by being Iagos, in other words, we destroy the very basis upon which the good or noble things exist in life.”

To me, this perfectly encapsulates a deep misunderstanding of the power of creativity. I believe we take too narrow a view of what creativity is. Creativity is typically associated with design, art, and literature. But imagination, innovation, and intuition are part of everything. Creativity is everywhere - in politics, science, economics - in every corner of our civilisation.

One way to broaden our definition of creativity is to look at where progress happens. Historically, this is often at the intersection of different disciplines, or through a breakthrough made by someone coming from one arena into another.

Take the example of Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner who in the late 18th century resolved to invent a better way of preserving food. During a period of experimentation that lasted 14 years, he discovered that bottling ingredients, then sealing and heating them, enabled contents to stay fresh for months. His innovative method was ignored until he introduced it to the navy, where it drastically increased the health of sailors. His work was the precursor of the canned food of today.

Great leaps of creativity often take place from a position of naivete or a lack of expertise.

As architects, when we take on a new commission, we enter a new world that we sometimes know little about - a recent example being a building we designed for nuclear fusion. It was precisely our inexperience in this field that allowed us to challenge the status quo. Our thinking was unbound by incumbent practices and - unlike Iago - it helped us find a creative balance between imagination and science.

Your weekly creative news is back!

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Last week in Creativity:

1. Lily Allen’s new album cover gets the Baroque treatment - painted by Spanish artist Nieves González.

2. The John Lewis Christmas ad has arrived - yes, we know it’s only November.

3. Sprint Milano is back - the beloved indie art book fair returns to Milan for its 2025 edition.

4. 1X unveils a new home robot - and it’s… slightly unsettling, if we’re honest.

Unlock your creativity.

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