Editor’s Note: In June, The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, by Pierluigi Serraino, will be published by Monacelli Press. The book is based on psychological tests conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958–59 to try to determine what promotes creativity in architects. RECORD presents excerpts of three case studies of the leading architects of the day—Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, and Richard Neutra—along with the author’s summary of the goals, methodology, and findings of this unusual, almost-forgotten investigation.
In 1958, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at the University of California, Berkeley, embarked on an ambitious endeavor to closely study 40 of the most creative architects living in the U.S. or working in the country at the time. This was part of a broader inquiry whose overall mission was to learn the personality characteristics of well-known creative people by observing them in a controlled setting. The ultimate goal was to develop a pedagogical environment that could foster creativity in future generations. The head of IPAR and this project was Donald MacKinnon, a former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) psychologist in World War II, who was in charge of identifying soldiers to carry out espionage in Europe and the Far East.
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