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.

Naked architecture

Naked architecture 

As a young architect, I've spent many hours trying to take impressive photographs of famous buildings: well lit, from an interesting viewpoint that afforded some attempt at clever composition and always devoid of people. That last thing was often the most time-consuming, as I had to play a waiting game with passers-by.

Even when I switched to just taking informative photographs, reminders of what I'd seen and felt at this or that part of a building (not necessarily famous), it took me some time before I was ready to accept people in the photographs. That's how I'd learned it: the photographs of buildings should be free from clutter that obscured the architectural features. It was alright to have a single human figure somewhere in the periphery as an indication of scale but that was all.

More recently, this has been turned around: I have become more and more interested in the interaction of humans and buildings, so I'm taking an increasing number of photographs and films exploring just this interaction - registering how people interfere with architecture in their daily activities.

I was reminded of the old habits when a colleague has a problem with a memory bar and asked me to recover its content on my computer. Many photographs were indeed recovered, so I put them back on the memory bar and handed it back to him saying "Here's your porn". He was puzzled and shocked: what did I mean? Well, I explained, the photographs were mostly of buildings devoid of people - naked buildings.

We laughed about it but later I thought there was more to it: architectural photography has some pornographic traits, like nudity and exaggeration. We are taught to lust after famous buildings and their forms. They may remain unattainable to most of us but they are what we would love to possess. Well, at least we have the photographs.

Nature and architecture

Nature and architecture 

I write here about natural environments but not just as journal entries on tourist experiences. I consider experiences with nature an integral part of architecture. What gives an architect any particular right to have views on the natural environment?

One could argue that quite a lot of what we consider natural is actually designed; also that the current association of the natural with the virgin, the unmolested by humans is rather recent notion and a very biased one, too. Living in the dense, small-scale Dutch suburbs of the Randstad I'm constantly amazed by the resilience of the flora and fauna, and their ability to come back and occupy even more than what we make available to them, so I'm disinclined to view my environment from a god-like perspective of human supremacy or to adopt sharp distinctions between the built and the natural environment.

We're just part of the environment, admittedly a very influential species, yet often powerless against e.g. a swarm of insects or a river flood. So, even though I keep writing about "the built environment" I acknowledge the unity of the environment and our partial role in it. Nature is not an accessory of architecture but the wider framework within which architecture and the rest of our culture exists. To understand better human foibles and achievements one needs to see the environment as a whole.

Yet another reason is that our perceptual apparatus has been formed by millions of years of interaction with environments where out influence has been minimal. Over these years deeply ingrained prejudices have developed, which often remain unaccounted for in architecture. Just think of the many buildings with visual cliffs in them and how often some people refuse to walk there. There's a lot to be learned from a less architecture-oriented view of the environment.