What to do
There are a number of different ways to use these exercises. You might just sample from them as the mood and opportunity strike. Alternatively, you can make a more intensive set of studies of a building or neighbourhood in which you go through the exercises step by step using the same site for all. Many of us plan parts of our vacations to include a visit to a specific building, just to appreciate its design. It’s no accident that virtually all city tourist guides include extensive information about a city’s architecture, though they often contain few clues about how to engage deeply with it.
A couple of other tips as you embark on your architectural adventures: it’s completely fine to explore buildings by yourself. In fact, much like solo movie-going, it can be liberating to be freed from the duty to talk to your friends about your experience. On the other hand, there’s much pleasure to be drawn from comparing notes. You’ll learn that our responses to buildings are hardly universal. Also, don’t feel that you have to visit the Louvre or the Sistine Chapel to practise these exercises. Indeed, there are benefits to exploring your responses to highly familiar spaces, even your own home (see the first exercise below).
Tune into how a building makes you feel and think
Architects must learn to attune themselves to the way that a design influences their feelings. This can be a little bit like mindfulness meditation and can be practised with very simple objects – even something like a chair or a vase – before working up to things such as cathedrals or other architectural showpieces. Though a trainee architect takes years to learn how to do this, some practice with the basics will enrich your experience of architecture.
As a first attempt, find the place within your own home that makes you feel most comfortable, safe and happy. You might consider where you go when you are most troubled or when you have to make a difficult decision. Where do you go for self-soothing? Go there when you’re ready.
Sit quietly for at least five minutes, as you might do if you were practising meditation. Keep your eyes open and remain alert to your surroundings. As best you can, tune in to your flow of thoughts. See if you start to feel a sense of slowing or quickening. Do your surroundings stimulate certain kinds of thoughts? Certain kinds of settings can elicit a sense of awe, for example, making you feel small compared with your surroundings. Then, try to attend to your bodily state: where is the tension? How is your breathing? Can you feel your heartbeat?
Finally, pay attention to your senses:
- What do you notice in the space around you? What features draw your attention? Do fine details draw you in? The contours of the space? Colours?
- What can you hear? Spaces ‘speak’ to you mostly by the way that reflected sounds (of footsteps, for example) reverberate and echo. You might try closing your eyes for a few seconds to get a sense of this.
- Can you detect a particular smell? As Marcel Proust illustrated so powerfully in his novel Remembrance of Things Past (1922-31), smells have an extraordinary effect on memory and emotion. It can be very difficult to feel positive emotions while in a place that is permeated by an unpleasant smell, while pleasant aromas (such as the smell of cooking) can quickly tilt your impression of a place.
- What about sensations of touch? Even if you aren’t touching anything at the moment, you can have a sense of how something would feel if you were touching it (the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa calls this sense ‘the eyes of the skin’). Look at the textures of the walls and floors. Does it seem as though you are feeling them with your fingers? What does it ‘feel’ like?
https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Eyes+of+the+Skin:+Architecture+and+the+Senses,+3rd+Edition-p-9781119941286Though some of this might seem like it has little to do with architecture, there is abundant evidence that the details of your surroundings exert a powerful influence on the patterns of your thoughts, your nervous system, and even the state of your heart and your skin. You might find yourself attending to the world in a different way while immersed in a space with lots of natural features, with less sharply focused attention. If you’re in a tightly constrained space, you might find yourself responding with anxiety and its attendant increase in heart rate and sweat gland activity.
A great way to better appreciate the impact of your surroundings is to experiment with different locations within your home. How do things change when you go from your quiet, happy place to a more dynamic, active location? For many people, the location within the home that sees the most dynamism is the kitchen. What happens when you try the same exercise there? One approach you can use is to go through the spaces of your home systematically and compare them. You could even make an annotated map on paper, jotting down what you sense and how you feel in each room.
You can also ask yourself: besides the actions of other inhabitants, what features of the spaces of your home contribute to your thoughts and feelings? Consider shape (including the shape of a particular room), patterns, colour, and form. For example, higher ceilings may promote abstract thinking, and people tend to find curvature attractive. You might even think about how you could change design elements within your home to shape it to your needs and desires.
With your observational toolkit tuned up, take your sensibilities on the road. You should be able to conduct the same kinds of procedures in any architectural space or, for that matter, as you behold any building’s exterior. What is your thinking like when you’re standing on the steps of a courthouse, gazing up at the details carved into its stone facade? How does your heart behave in an art gallery? What’s your mood like in an unfamiliar restaurant? As with your learner exercises in the home, try to tune in to the elements that speak to you. What are they saying? With time and practice, this kind of assessment of a built space can start to become automatic. Those responses have always been there. You are now just training yourself to be attuned to them.
Move through a building and observe how you react
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 19th-century German poet-scientist, reportedly described architecture as ‘frozen music’. It’s a compelling idea, but it might also be misleading. In spite of what I asked you to do in the previous exercise, it isn’t common for us to sit still when experiencing architecture, observing it from a single, fixed perspective. Instead, we are frequently in motion. If we are using a building for whatever it is designed to do, then we are moving through it from one useful place to another. If we are simply enjoying or appreciating a building, then we are still moving, but now driven mostly by what attracts or repels us. In other words, if architecture is music, then the moving observer is the conductor.
For this exercise, it would make less sense to learn the ropes in your own home. Unless you live in a large estate or castle, the affordances for movement are probably restricted. Instead, go out into the world and find a place that interests you. A shopping mall, city hall, hotel, museum or any other large architectural space will work.
Allow yourself to move through the space as your desires call to you. Allow yourself to be pushed and pulled by your surroundings. In the mid-20th century, a political movement led by the artist-philosopher Guy Debord advocated exactly this kind of practice, which was called a dérive, or ‘drift’. The legendary Swiss French architect Le Corbusier described what he called the ‘architectural promenade’, which is a similar idea for interiors. He suggested that interiors have itineraries, which are brought to life by our movements as we traverse a space. More generally, architects are preoccupied with transitions – those locations in a building where, as we walk, a surprising vista is suddenly unveiled. Think of the effect of descending a grand staircase or turning a corner to discover an unexpectedly large vault of space, which can cause changes of posture and movement with an attendant effect on our senses, a kind of awakening.
As you walk around a building, try to notice how moving through the space affects you. In a way, you can think of this exercise as a graduation from the first one. But now that you are moving, there are many more opportunities to notice the effects of the design of a building on your body. Do you find yourself wanting to speed up or slow down? Does your posture change as you walk through different spaces? Do you notice anything special about where you want to stop and look around?
Explore the functionality of a building
One measure of the success of a building is surely the enjoyment, awe and appreciation of its design. However, there is an important distinction between the performance of a building as a work of art and its role as a functioning piece of machinery in the fabric of life. A breathtaking library is a thing to admire, but if it is very difficult to find a book or even one’s own way, there is a level at which the building has failed.
So, when you explore a building, take a step back and think about what the building is for. If the building you are visiting is one that has a personal use for you, this is easy enough. If you visit an airport in order to take a flight, then its success has much to do with things like your ability to find the right terminal and the right gate. But, during your peregrinations through the built world, you’ll also want to explore buildings that may not have such a direct connection with your own life.
An elaborate civic building such as a courthouse might well affect your emotions when you enter it, but it is also designed to do work. How well does it perform? In this case, the most important clues might come not from looking inward but by looking outward to watch the behaviour of others. Where do people linger? Do they seem to be lingering there for a clear reason? In a well-designed space, locations of lingering and gathering are planned carefully. Museum and gallery curators, for example, think deeply about how a visitor explores a space. The British Museum in London commissioned very detailed explorations of such questions in order to maximise the impact of the building. Similarly, do you see people finding their way through the building with ease, or do they seem to trace and retrace their paths? Though the exterior of the Seattle Central Library is striking, its taxing multi-level, labyrinthine design poses some formidable wayfinding challenges. Some other kinds of spaces, especially those like airports and other transit stations that are designed to optimise the flow of traffic, are often more successful in helping people find their way.
Understanding how a building works in this more practical sense takes a little time to do well. If you have the chance to spend an hour or more in a building such as a courthouse or a library, you can take up a variety of positions, watch the buzz of activity, and get a feel for how things are working (or not).
As you develop experience, you’ll also want to reflect on the interactions between your emotional responses to spaces (all the things you learned to attend to in the first two exercises) and the functions of the space. Does a certain kind of functionality, or lack thereof, contribute to certain feelings for you? In one of my own experiments, I sought to measure emotional responses to an affordable housing complex in New York’s Lower East Side that was, to my eye, poorly designed – with simple cinderblocks and hostile fencing that discouraged lingering. I found that people who were visitors to the area (like me) responded negatively to the site, although many local residents who knew the history and culture of the buildings responded with warm affection. Museums and galleries are particularly interesting examples, as an important part of the function of such buildings is to heighten engagement of the senses and the body. Navigability plays a role in fulfilling this function, but artful designers also think about the impact of transitions from one part of the space to another and the flow of events as one traverses the space.
Consider the building’s context in time and space
To gain a deeper appreciation for how a building relates to the world around it, it helps to dig into its history, its critics, and the stories told about (or by) its architect. Any landmark building anywhere in the world is likely to have voluminous material about it online, but even less famous places are often well documented. If you’re interested in a big, old house in your town, an online search or the local town hall will often bear fruit. Historical plaques on buildings are useful starting points and some even include links for a deeper exploration. Many cities have architectural walking tours that are offered live or via a freely available annotated map. (Here’s an example from the small city where I live.) These sources can provide a wealth of useful contextual information.
Try seeking answers to the following questions to explore the background and context of a building:
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What’s going on in the neighbourhood? There’s rarely a better option than exploring the area on foot to get a better sense of this. Who is here? What are they doing? What is the vibe? Go beyond your own exploration, though, to dig into the history of the neighbourhood, starting with an online search. Take a look at a map of the building’s surroundings as well.
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Who was the architect? For ordinary buildings, especially residential ones, this might be more challenging to discover. For institutional and larger commercial buildings, however, the answer is often available at the building’s website. Exploring the body of work of the architect and their design philosophy will often yield insight into the building that interests you.
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How old is the building? Architecture is, of course, not static. Tastes change and so does the world. Transportation networks, the economy and lifestyles all evolve and, as they do so, architectural fashions adapt. It’s very common, for example, for two adjacent buildings to have been constructed in different eras and to embody different architectural styles. In the best cases, the later buildings will still relate stylistically to the earlier ones in some way. Exploring the temporal relationships between a building and its surroundings can provide fascinating insight.
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What was the building’s approval process like? All buildings need permission and, for larger buildings, the regulatory approval process can be lengthy and complex. Except for very controversial buildings, this can take quite a lot of digging to unearth, but fruitful sources are often the archives of local news media or, if you have a lot of patience and interest, even the minutes of local government meetings.
As an example of this exploratory approach, look at the building called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. This structure earned a place on many ‘world’s worst architecture’ lists, its appearance derided as ugly and alien. The glass pyramid addition to the Louvre in Paris, designed by I M Pei, was similarly reviled when it was first unveiled in the 1980s. Countless public consultations dealing with proposed new designs encounter protests from stakeholders that a building ‘just doesn’t fit the neighbourhood’. So, at all levels, from giant new urban skyscrapers to more modest new buildings in the suburbs, we are preoccupied with the way a building fits into its setting.
In the case of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, opened in 2007, the structure was conceived as an odd-looking add-on to a museum building that was designed early in the 20th century and styled mostly in a classical Italianate fashion (roughly based on 16th-century Italian Renaissance styles). The Crystal consists of a series of interlocking shapes (like crystals, hence the name) that jut provocatively from the side of the original building. Though the intentions of its architect – incidentally, the same Daniel Libeskind as designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin – might seem opaque, they are born partly of an attempt to riff on the original design, dragging it from the early 20th century into a more dynamic future, and fitting the context of a city poised to grow into a world centre of culture and commerce. The crystalline design was also meant to resonate with parts of the museum’s collections, such as its impressive mineralogy exhibition. The architect’s provocative style most often involves eye-catching (and usually slightly disturbing) sharp angles and honed edges.
As this example shows, your senses and movements can take you only so far in the effort to appreciate a building fully. You must also engage with its greater story – and you might be surprised by what you discover. It’s important to keep an open mind. Though there certainly are some architectural horror stories, a deeper exploration will often help you better understand a building that, on first appearance, doesn’t seem to make much sense.
