Failing the physical

Failing the physical

A fellow architect and university professor was talking to me about a lecture she'd attended. It was by some big shot from the museum world, whom she had found extremely knowledgeable and intelligent but at the same time irritating. I listened to her account and counterarguments why the big shot had it wrong but soon I drifted off. All I was hearing was differences of opinion concerning symbolic interpretations, semantic aspects, digitisation and various meta-matters. I compared these to my own recent experiences at museums and realised that this particular architectural debate was far removed from the physical reality and human interaction with it. It felt as if architecture had abandoned the physical environment, as if it no longer posed a challenge, as if everything there had been solved and architects had to move on to higher things.

Unfortunately, that's not the case and quite probably will never be. The built environment is far from what it should be in terms of behaviour and performance. It costs too much and delivers comparatively little. In museums, engineers may have managed to solve lighting, humidity and other technical problems but interaction with the resulting environment is often disappointing. Visitors may still experience glare when viewing a painting, may even have trouble finding a decent point from where to view a painting (just try to do so in front of one of the major masterpieces in any museum), circulation can be irritating, orientation can be a problem etc. Architecture hasn't moved on from those issues, it has failed them.