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How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture

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The award-winning journalist Emily Anthes’s book The Great Indoors (2020) focuses on the impact that interior environments have on our lives. The book is replete with fascinating examples and important applications of the science of interior design. ArchDaily. 2022. The Therme Vals / Peter Zumthor. [online] Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022].

What was the building’s approval process like? All buildings need permission and, for larger buildings, the regulatory approval process can be lengthy and complex. Except for very controversial buildings, this can take quite a lot of digging to unearth, but fruitful sources are often the archives of local news media or, if you have a lot of patience and interest, even the minutes of local government meetings. My own book Places of the Heart (2015) was written to bring to wider attention the fascinating relationships between the design of buildings and interior spaces, and our emotional lives. Allow yourself to move through the space as your desires call to you. Allow yourself to be pushed and pulled by your surroundings. In the mid-20th century, a political movement led by the artist-philosopher Guy Debord advocated exactly this kind of practice, which was called a dérive, or ‘drift’. The legendary Swiss French architect Le Corbusier described what he called the ‘architectural promenade’, which is a similar idea for interiors. He suggested that interiors have itineraries, which are brought to life by our movements as we traverse a space. More generally, architects are preoccupied with transitions – those locations in a building where, as we walk, a surprising vista is suddenly unveiled. Think of the effect of descending a grand staircase or turning a corner to discover an unexpectedly large vault of space, which can cause changes of posture and movement with an attendant effect on our senses, a kind of awakening.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 19th-century German poet-scientist, reportedly described architecture as ‘frozen music’. It’s a compelling idea, but it might also be misleading. In spite of what I asked you to do in the previous exercise, it isn’t common for us to sit still when experiencing architecture, observing it from a single, fixed perspective. Instead, we are frequently in motion. If we are using a building for whatever it is designed to do, then we are moving through it from one useful place to another. If we are simply enjoying or appreciating a building, then we are still moving, but now driven mostly by what attracts or repels us. In other words, if architecture is music, then the moving observer is the conductor.

By purchasing this Precedents Analysis eBook, you will receive all of our “Precedents Analysis eBook” updates for free, forever. How old is the building? Architecture is, of course, not static. Tastes change and so does the world. Transportation networks, the economy and lifestyles all evolve and, as they do so, architectural fashions adapt. It’s very common, for example, for two adjacent buildings to have been constructed in different eras and to embody different architectural styles. In the best cases, the later buildings will still relate stylistically to the earlier ones in some way. Exploring the temporal relationships between a building and its surroundings can provide fascinating insight. There are ways to avoid falling into the trap of com- place-ency. They resemble the contemplative practices that human beings have used for millennia to find more direct connections with themselves and their surroundings. The methods of the contemplative sciences are also commonly used by architects and designers to tune their own designs. As we will see, being still and being receptive to your surroundings – letting a scene wash over all your senses with as little analytic interruption as possible – while not an easy thing to do, can, with practice, enrich your experience of places. What can you hear? Spaces ‘speak’ to you mostly by the way that reflected sounds (of footsteps, for example) reverberate and echo. You might try closing your eyes for a few seconds to get a sense of this.

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