The Experience of Architecture

Henry Plummer

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773642
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

How does the experience of turning a door handle, opening a door from one space to lead into another, affect us? It is no wonder that the door, one of the most elemental architectural forms, has such metaphorical richness. But even on a purely physical human level, the cold touch of a brass handle or the swish of a sliding screen gives rise to an emotional reaction, sometimes modest, occasionally profound.

This book aims to understand how these everyday acts in space are influenced by architectural form, a concept that is vital for all architects to grasp if our buildings are to be anything more than a commercial or aesthetic enterprise. It considers how specific built elements and volumes, taken from a wide array of buildings and settings around the world, can sustain or deny our powers of decision. From the hand-carved stairs in Greek villages to free-floating catwalks, from the elegant processional steps of Renaissance Italy to Frank Lloyd Wrights masterly manipulation of form, from the seemingly random placement of Japanese stepping stones to the staircase in Chareaus Glass House, all provide very difference experiences of stepping from one level to the next, and all affect our experience of that space.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of our daily interactions with architecture, looking at stairs, floors and paths, moving interior spaces, perception and perspective, transparency and the relationship between a building and its setting. This book is not just for architects and designers engaged in the production of space, but for all those who seek a richer understanding of their place in the built world.

1

floors of agility

The ground of the built environment is our primary source of opportunities to bring the body alive as a creative force in motion, exercising faculties of balance and agility inherited from the distant past. When omnipresent and despite its necessity, a predictably uniform ground of flat floors and repetitive steps subjects us to monotonous, mechanical movement, dissociating power from the body. More challenging and playful terrains – variable staircases, shifting slopes, unexpected level changes – give us a chance to interact and improvise with the floor, reviving our bodily powers in space. The act of motion becomes, in part, an end in itself, confirming that we are vital forces even as we go about our daily routines.

Paul Klee, Tightrope Walker, 1923 (Kunstmuseum Bern)

The floor is not only the ground of our world, but also the springboard of our motion. Our simplest acts in the physical environment are performed on this surface while manoeuvring over its terrain. Although these prospects disappear on a flat, predictable ground, they multiply on one that is stepped or furrowed, tilted or curved, especially when these disruptions are marked by surprising and alluring features, inviting us to move creatively, rather than automatically, in response to the contours underfoot.

When negotiating uneven ground, a person’s mobility is never reduced to gross forward motion, but entails an assortment of springy vibrations that control and surround the overall flow. Torso and limbs tense and bend with ever-shifting and often precise adjustments to emerging terrain. A miraculous anatomy within the legs is called into play to stretch and compress as it bounds forward to land securely on the next momentary perch, before launching again into the air. Soles and toes wrap around textures with a primate-like effort to grip and exploit each new surface, subtly attuning the gait and flow of the vaulting body. These tiny creative discharges are concentrated where nerve endings abound, being a little more sluggish in the torso and sensitive in the extremities. Our peripatetic gestures are not simple vectors but clouds of motor and sensory impulses enwrapping horizontal progress, numerous erratic adjustments of each footfall that bestow a personal aura on motion. These eccentric pressures and releases are not appendages to movement but a penumbra of barely noticed forces that infuse walking with autonomous power.

In the interplay of flesh and ground, a varied and uncertain surface ensures that our movements are always fresh, transforming muscular effort into innovative actions. But equally important to this enterprise is the distinct and rugged character of the surface we cross. These qualities determine whether a floor is exhilarating or dull, and worthy of our pursuit. A topography that is unique and unmistakable, with clear and differentiated challenges that are instantly recognizable (even if never seen before), adds a special intensity and extra kinesthetic depth to motion. The grasping and releasing of lush terrain, revelling in our bodily skills at the height of play with the ground below, brings about a primal freedom known only to man. The experience carries us back to our origins, to the earliest gropings of infancy and further back to the beginnings of the human adventure.

Human faculties shaped aeons ago in a gravitational matrix of earth and trees require a periodic return to unsure terrain, where stimulating yet risky contours disrupt habitual and often mechanical motions. Everyone from the newborn to the aged needs unprotected places with challenges suited to their own capabilities, where they can test the limits of their limbs, senses and brains, so that each of these powers becomes an extension of the will. This kind of self-creative research, with its solitary trials and errors, its sudden surprises and strenuous encounters, is a simple yet fundamental act of facing the unknown and building self-reliance.

Most importantly, every surge over an uncertain floor calls the body itself back to life, as an impassioned tangle of flesh and bone, a figure struggling to burst from its frame in a wave of being, restoring our very existence. We make ourselves more vital and real by learning that the body through which we exist in the world is, for that moment, vital and real. The body is substantially alive and there in its strains and efforts, as it responds and adjusts to distinct yet ever-new conditions. Brought to awareness is a visceral and muscular presence, but also creative faculties roused to cope with an unpredictable ground. Whether one’s body is graceful or awkward, it is pulsing with power.

Brought forth, as well, in these limber manoeuvres are the underlying motives of the self, an often hidden force at work that is beneath awareness yet flickers with impulses. In spontaneous acts of strolling over a challenging terrain, the ‘I’ wells up and appears, expressing itself through marvellous deeds and taking charge of its own destiny. This simple experience brings about an exquisite mutation of being, revealing something of one’s innermost persona – exposing hidden aspirations and fears, capacities and limitations, but also something of who one potentially is, helping reshape and strengthen one’s identity.

THE DOCILE EFFECT OF FLAT GROUND

Just as the terrain of the world can empower the body, it also can drain that power away, for its contours are urgently needed to supply opportunities on which we can act. The constructed ground over which we commonly walk – the floors in our homes, the continuous ribbons of sidewalks, the broad pavements of streets and plazas – depletes our power if it fails to respond to our presence and stimulate our faculties, presenting merely a uniform surface stripped of human deeds to perform.

On a floor that is perfectly flat and level there is no chance to interact with its surface, nor bring into play an extraordinary agility inherited from aeons of human evolution. Each contact with the standardized surface is the same, from every dull slap of the feet to every tedious stretch of the legs. Each dreary footfall weans us from a give and take with the ground, diminishing our responsibility and in a very real sense subduing and breaking our animal spirits, killing the spontaneity within us. The levelled floor gradually drills the human body into a kind of robotic motion. Nobody trips or falls on the unbroken plane, nor is anyone slowed when gliding over its vacant texture. But neither does anyone feel alive as a creative force in motion, since the horizontal plane has pacified the body and robbed it of power. By the same token, this floor presents an ideal terrain for machines and for people willing to move like machines, since it is totally divested of any interruption to easy and a priori motion, rewarding only the foot tamed by habit. There is no floor better suited to the routine behaviour of mass culture.

I am not suggesting the elimination of level floors, which provide benefits of practicality, accessibility and safety. Rather, I wish to propose that their omnipresence marks a new kind of danger for human existence. To live out one’s life on a harmless and predictable ground would seem, at first glance, to assist the preservation of life. But, paradoxically, life as we know it is an evolving structure that resists monotonous conservation and demands instead a perpetual renewal by forgoing the comfort of a steady state. A sterile ground puts our agile faculties to sleep and conveys that we are impotent and automatic creatures, diminishing our sense of being animate. To put it more bluntly, the habitual ground that conserves life by eliminating risk is in reality a mechanism that, when universal, depletes and perverts the human spirit.

Downward flight (left) and detail (right) of rock-carved steps, Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico

VERNACULAR STAIRS AND FOOTPATHS

Illuminating the idea that inventive motion transcends the benefits of physical exercise, and constitutes a fundamental responsibility of architecture, is Bernard Rudofsky in Streets for People. The primary human value of walking, he suggests, is that it grants us the freedom to stroll without any narrow aim or purpose. Among our exploits on foot, he notes, ‘the act of descending a staircase … represents the highest form of peripatetics’, and for people who are strolling together, ‘discoursing on this stylized slope demands a high discipline of give and take, and more than a touch of stagecraft’.²⁴ Rudofsky finds the apotheosis of creative walking in the urban staircases of Italy – notably Rome, from the divergent inclines to Michelangelo’s Cam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction: Places of Possibility
• 1 Floors of Agility
• 2 Mechanisms of Transformation
• 3 Spaces of Versatility
• 4 Depths of Discovery
• 5 Fields of Action
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photo Credits
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright