“If walls could talk,” is the old expression. News flash - they do. Some walls are boring, and do not have much to say. Some walls speak volumes by nature of unthinkable blandness. Some walls walls say just enough to get you interested. It’s true. Everything single object has some sort of intrinsic meaning and message. Materials cost money. Some of them are quite expensive. The true value of a material, however, is not found on the price tag in Home Depot. It is found in the message that material sends.
When humans first began to build, they did so for simple reasons, and their buildings were made quite simply. People need shelter, so they made their shelter with what they had. Examples of this can be seen throughout history. Native Americans in the Southwest had Adobe houses. Pioneers across the great plains had sod roofs. At the time, people were just building what they needed with what they had at hand. As time passed, however, these materials began to take on meaning by virtue of their context and their very existence. Adobe bricks conjure images of the desert, with its empty spaces and beating sun. The modern equivalent of the sod roof is, perhaps, the green roof. In addition to the environmental incentive of a green roof, we also have the cultural context of the prairie and its sweeping plains. There are so many subtexts within a building. Every piece of it contributes a unique element to the whole. Every piece has a story of its own.
Today we are able to process information and draw connections faster than ever. The context of materials grows more and more complex as we continue to use them in different capacities. The dialogue between materials is one that has been built up over centuries of design and millennia of construction. This leaves designers with a difficult challenge to face. The bar has been both raised and lowered simultaneously. We have the ability to create with more freedom in all aspects, but the information age is very good at pointing out our mistakes.
Let’s take a look at an example. Here we find a symbolic contradiction of forms, no matter how we look at it. Notice the bell towers on the first image, with their curved cornices and tightly grouped columns. See the similarities with the lantern of the second building? As one may have recognized, the building on the left is St Paul’s Cathedral in London. It was designed by Christopher Wren for many good reasons. One of them was to be the headquarters for the Protestant Church in England. This church on the right is Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. It happens to be designed by Francesco Borromini, who happened to be a principal architect for the Roman Catholic Church in the Counter-Reformation. This shared form was practically trademarked by Borromini. Sant’Ivo was consecrated fifteen years before construction on Saint Paul’s began. Do you see the problem here? St Paul’s is a beautiful church and a monumental achievement by Christopher Wren, but you can’t help but cringe at the unfortunate connection between his design and Borromini’s. This is the kind of thing that an architect would like to avoid doing.
I don’t think my work as a student and aspiring architect will place me in any context with the potential for disaster on as grand of a scale as described above any time soon, but it is always good to stay prepared. Knowing is half the battle, I suppose. Every little piece does matter, and if we’re not careful, they can matter a whole lot more than we would have ever liked them to. Every building has a story, and these stories are told by the materials we make them with. They all contribute a sentence or two, if you would. It is up to the designer to make sure that once these sentences are put together, they actually make sense. If we fail to do this, we may end up creating a building that costs a lot of money, but has no real value.
No comments:
Post a Comment