Properly constructed walls

Properly constructed walls

When one sees a wall one can never tell what's behind the outer layers. The paint and plaster may be immaculate but underneath the bricks can be rotten, thrown together haphazardly or full of holes. Reversely, the paint may be flaking off, the plaster cracking but otherwise the wall can be sound, just in need of some light maintenance. It's often difficult to know.

I guess it all melts down to what one wants to do with the wall. It's condition may be acceptable depending on one's requirements and purposes. A flaking wall indoors makes little sense but in a garden it may be acceptable as a picturesque element, something weathered and full of reminiscences. Even a crumbling wall might do in a garden but one wouldn't have it indoors. It would n't just be unity and dirty, there's little if anything one can do with a crumbling wall: one can't use it to support a floor or a roof, or to separate spaces; it might be useless even for hanging up shelves or pictures.

It's always like that: it's not the wall but what one wants to do with it in the particular location and situation. It might be because we call too many things "a wall". If we used more specific terms, we might be able to express more precisely what we want. It can also be that a wall doesn't have a purposeful existence without a space to bound and support: what we want may be part of the space and it just gets projected on the poor wall.

Solids & voids

Solids & voids

It's quite uncommon to see building elements and spaces represented in the same way. Most of the time, the one is implicit in the other (as with spaces in conventional architectural drawings) or is a product of the other (as with spaces in BIM). Usually, its the spaces that are implicit or derivative. In architecture, we may shape space but in fact we build solid elements; what is left over within the volume of a building is the 'voids' (a bad name because spaces contain quite a lot). A figure-ground reversal is seldom applicable to the duality of solids and voids in architecture.

This is one of the reasons why I'm interested in alternative representations like graphs. Using graphs one can describe both building elements and spaces in the same way, si that their complementary character becomes apparent. After that, it's possible to see different patterns emerge, patterns that describe and possibly explain stuff one's only vaguely aware of.

Solids & voids

Solids & voids 

It is unfortunate that many perceptions of architecture consider only its solids: the building elements that comprise a building. The voids, the spaces bounded by those elements, are at least as important. It's in these spaces that we deploy our activities; it's for the benefit of these spaces that we construct these building elements. Yet, I wouldn't consider the solids as just means for the voids. The relation of the two is more complex and interesting than that. Thankfully, a few researchers have realised that and worked on useful formalisms and produced some interesting insights.

There's a lot that we still haven't properly explored in the duality of solids and voids in architecture but what never ceases to surprise me in a most pleasant way is that once once acknowledges it, many problems can be easily resolved. Propagating properties, constraints, behaviour or performance from solids to voids and vice versa becomes a transparent, straightforward solution to all kinds of information and design issues - and the existing techniques help a lot. In fact, I would argue that this duality should be a foundation of architectural thinking; not something one just says and then forgets but an operational correlation that supports a complete toolkit of methods and techniques.