How architects view buildings – and how normal people understand them

As an interpretative planner, I work with architects on a day to day basis, on most of my projects: conservation architects, new build architects, signature architects, repair and restoration architects... I am intrigued by their inspired genius and also by their sometimes extraordinary lack of insight into how people who are not architects understand spaces. Actually, we don’t – and that’s the issue. People do not “understand” spaces – we do not tend to think conceptually about them. We inhabit them, we move through them, we are enveloped by them, and we generally think that a space that does not mould around us and change with us is...uncomfortable.

The picture above shows the inside of the Beetle's House by Architect Terunobu Fujimori - which is as small as a sauna, and has a wonderful smell of charcoal. It is on display for active visitors who love rung ladders at the V&A.

As visitors to museums and heritage sites, we browse around elements inside spaces, walk toward colour, are attracted by physical interventions within the space, we are magnetically drawn to sofas when we are tired, and to windows when we are lost – and none of these apply if we are accompanied by children or bored partners.

This is why an interpretative designer, who designs to communicate, is generally more conscious of visitor interaction and patterns of behaviour than an architect. Interpretative designers choreographthe visitor experience within museums, galleries, heritage sites etc – they are less interested in iconic voids and structures, but more focused on understanding spaces as narrative environments – not just because they are full of stories (about objects and research) – but because they are the stories: those stories that unfold around the visitor, as he or she explores and brings them to life. The visitor with the Midas touch.

At the V&A last night it was interesting to reflect on the architectural exhibition on the 4th floor. It functions as a continuation of the Architecture Galleries, but it's about the temporary building installations within the Museum I mentioned in my previous blog.
It is an exhibition by architects for architects.

The exhibition presents a series of models. In essence, curatorially, it manages to enclose external models of buildings into glass showcases. The models are boxes, seen from outside, inside another sealed box, seen from outside – and through a glass screen. I am sure a postmodern philopspher would have an appropriate comment to make here.

What the exhibition does is to unwittingly confirm the introductory leaflet’s own critical view of what architecture exhibitions should not do:

Architecture is intrinsically part of our everyday experience. Yet architecture exhibitions, with their emphasis on drawings, models and photographs, sometimes deny their audience an engagement with actual buildings.

Aha!

So while attempting to subvert how we understand spaces by building climb-in full scale models to explore, the V&A seems to place at the heart of its interpretative effort when reflecting on its practice, a very traditional approach to buildings – seen (and presented to the public) as perfectly formed, miniature objects that you look at from outside. If you would like to see what I mean, applied to museums and heritage in general, google image any name of any museum/art gallery you might know – and I will buy you a coffee if your first image is not of a building, seen from outside.

As an interpretative planner, I find working with interpretative designers an easier fit than working with architects as designers and communicators of content to visitors. Interpretative designers think of movement through museum spaces as a rhythmic beat, an evolving, diversely paced experience, with emotional highs and lows, dramatic surprises, points of suspension, intellectual climaxes and sensory features. All this is woven into the content of the Museum, inextricably.

I struggle with the view (some) architects have of architecture – which is just as well, since, at the end of the day, I am not an architect.

1:1

Yesterday evening I attended the opening of the free exhibition 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces at the V&A, on until August 30. The exhibition features seven full scale installations of mini buildings at key points in the Museum: inside the newly opened Cast Courts gallery, inside the stairwell that leads to the National Art Library, in the John Madejski gardens, in the inside/outside space of the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries of which I have already posted a blog, outside the Architecture Galleries on the fourth floor, and in the entrance foyer.

I was quite happy to wonder away from the star studded champagne-drinking crowd. This was an exciting mix of architects, fashionistas, designers and creative professionals, cultural trendy characters – the V&A’s secret visitors, those whom you would not catch sight of in the middle of a Saturday afternoon looking lost and slightly overwhelmed… but who turn up at the glitzy events.

All the structures can be climbed into – although bare feet are required in some – they have restricted capacity, sometimes for only 6 people at one time, and the wooden bookshelf building by Norwegian architects Rintala Eggertsson on 3 floors is wobbly when you get to the top. Which makes for a slightly seasick reading experience, but a visually exciting and imaginative connection between the inside of the house and the see-through bookshelves through which you stare at the National Art Library. I peeked through the books while holding onto the real stairwell banister – and the quote was... appropriate:

A surreal moment.

I found the Beetle’s House by Japanese Architect Terunobu Fujimori an exciting intervention for it seems to tug at our heartstrings, and it reminded me of something I have never actually built or owned personally – a tree house, a primeval children’s adventure.

The outdoor Ratatosk by Norwegian Architects Helen and Hard was great for people watching, and struck me as very empathetic to the extraordinary red brick facades with their Victorian Gothic arches which surround it. (The snapshot of the yellow heel which opens this blog belonged to a lady who was picking her way carefully over the soft cushion platform made from wood and bark chips on which the structure sits.)

In terms of the politics of space - and I base this on my viewing of the drawings and visuals from all the entries which are on display in the Architecture Gallery on the 4th floor - I think the original competition may have asked architects to visualise their minibuilding in one of the premium spaces of the Cast Courts – next to the plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David. This statue, which stands at 17 feet tall (5.7m), was the first major cast in the Museum’s collection, and is one of my true loves - the first picture below shows it before the 1:1 installation.

The installation that has landed what I consider to be the prize spot is by Indian Architects Studio Mumbai. It takes inspiration from the so called unauthorized structures that exist in Mumbai, narrow slithers of buildings “basically sandwiched between the outside wall of a warehouse and the boundary wall of a property”. (The images below are from the audiovisual in the entrance foyer - and express the architectural inspiration.)

The location of the structure - called In Between Architecture - in the Cast Court seems to create an unexpected conversation between two opposing ideas of public space: that defined on the one hand as the grand, sun filled, open piazza in Renaissance Florence, and on the other by the circulation thoroughfares in Mumbai today, that run through private dwellings, in between spaces, drawing the light in from slits above. Private spaces that symbolise the pressures on public space. (This is a view from the inside of the structure looking up - a plaster cast of a real tree, an organic form absorbed within the concrete shape sits central to the building.)

David stands taller than the structure, seeming to contemplate it with a certain wariness – and the dialogue is electrifying.

If you're in London, go and see it. If not, the website is: http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/architecture/smallspaces/index.html

And... on a final note.

Walking past the V&A’s enormous halls in the evening, peering into the darkened galleries, contemplating the sleeping showcases and the objects inside them, quiet and still, is a beautiful, calming experience. I enjoyed this as much as the structures – and the other stunning architectural specimens which seem passé, redundant giants: the cast of Trajan’s Column for example, unceremoniously chopped into half to fit the void. What wonderful places museums are!

Highlights from a National Correspondent

Just back from a long week in Finland where I was attending the European Museum of the Year Award. This same event started me blogging about a year ago – so it is time for celebrations as an eventful year rolls around, and a thank you to followers of this blog who are so patient with its inconsistencies and randomnic posts.

Cheers! – or, as I learnt from my Estonian colleagues: terviseks, which stands for health and sex!

The event is a highlight of my professional year – and it was absolutely wonderful this year, full of exciting professionals and creative thinkers. Tampere is a small city, called the Manchester of the North for its textile industry. The industrial area founded by the Scotsman James Finlayson bears his name to this day and has been wonderfully readapted as a multifunctional cultural, cinema, restaurant, exhibition quarter. 210,000 people live in Tampere, and there are 100 museums (!!) including the only extant Lenin Museum in the world. As the Mayor of the City mentioned during an opening speech, Finland's rapid progress as a post industrial economy is founded on its profound respect for its industrial heritage, and its ability to transform them into new and inventive public places. The whole experience made for a certain self satisfied, mouth watering museum glut – for which I do not apologise.

I was overjoyed to be offered to become the UK National Correspondent for the European Museum Forum, the organisation that awards the prize annually. I walked into the Sara Hilden Modern Art Gallery in Tampere on Thursday night, a normal person – and came out two hours later honoured by the title. (The photograph above relates to a previous visit to the Gallery).

Talk about the transformative power of museums!

My role will be that of encouraging UK museums to apply for the award and generally make intelligent connections between them and the European museum network. So let’s hear it for diminished isolation of the British museum scene from our European counterparts! Terviseks!

Architecture of Science

I was invited to the Natural History Museum's showcasing of its new Cocoon structure - an organically shaped, white, seven floor high 'pod' encased by the Darwin Centre, the Museum's new extension to the west of the Cromwell Road entrance. The Darwin Centre is the first new build on the site since 1881 when the Museum moved here - it cost £78 million and took three years to build. It is quite impressive, although not totally original. Designed by C. F. Møller Architects of Denmark, architecturally it echoes other iconic scientific institutions - the dome above the Smithsonian Natural History Museum on the Washington Mall,but more specifically the renowned Butterfly Pavilion contained within:

...as well as a curious experiment at the Centre of the Cell, an interactive science experience for schools, designed by Will Alsop within the Medical Research Building of Queen Mary College in east London:

The pod shape, the organic cocoon, is obviously an inspiration for scientific architecture worldwide. The Cocoon enwraps the huge Spirit collection - so called not because of any ghostly Victorian reminiscence but because the 20 million historic specimens of botany and entomology (plants and insects to you and me) were and are conserved in 'spirit' - jars containing preservation fluids. It must have been the most inflammable piece of real estate in Victorian London!

The Cocoon itself resembles nothing as much as a huge dinosaur egg waiting to hatch. What strikes me is how well scientific content is explored within. Circulation through a ramp down 3 floors is punctuated by incredibly beautiful showcases with specimens pinned into the glass panes. The design language seems to preserve the beauty of nature as intact as possible - I seemed to be breathing outdoors, the colours and the freshness of the specimens on show bringing to mind simply the freshness of life and nature outside.

This is quite a feat - to maintain intact the beauty of nature while dissecting it. High tech interactives accompany interpretative insights into the processes of science as a human endeavour - visitors can peek at scientists poring over their research benches and all interpretation - down to the voice in the lift - is delivered by real scientists at the NHM. This is a solid attempt at demistifying science and positioning it in the minds of youngsters and adults alike as human activity. It is refreshing, interpretatively successful and while targetting a younger audience not simplistic or juvenile.

And humour comes in handy, too, in the overarching interpretative approach. The installation I photographed below focuses on a very simple but crucial scientific challenge - that of categorisation. At school we learnt about taxonomy through the study of heavy Latin texts - the Linnean system of Regnum Animale, Vegetabile et Lapideum. From there, the levels were divided into classes, and again into orders genera and species. But the relevance of this was never obvious enough to turn the lesson into something more interesting than a mnemonic exercise. But we categorise and organise every single instant of our lives. By colour, material, shape or sound; by cost, feel, or relevance to the moment... in what we do, or choose to wear; in whom we do what with, in where we go and why. Clusters of complex reasoning, instantaneous decisions made and then reviewed continuously. This process is captured in the miscellaneous selection of unrelated objects displayed in this showcase. By simply surprising our logic capability, it challenges our thinking. Why are these things displayed together? In a sense, it captures the very essence of museological display.

Personnes, Paris

There is something very powerful about walking into huge industrial cathedrals of a bygone era – such as abandoned steelworks, or the vast voids of Battersea Power Station on London’s Southbank, or Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The Grand Palais in Paris, which I visited for the first time the last weekend, is one such space, devoted to contemporary art.

It houses Christian Boltanski’s latest installation for Monumenta 2010 – an annual review of art. Personnes can only be described as a reflection on death. As a visitor, you go through a cursory security check, then walk into a rusting wall of numbered boxes set as a barrier in front of your path – you are obliged to walk around it, under its haunting light bulbs. The bulbs, peculiarly reminiscent of those hanging around the fences of concentration camps, were the first indicators, to me, that I was stepping into an installation about death.

With a post modern sense of shock, I became aware of being – not feeling, but being – incredibly lonely in this too-large-to-be-crowded space. Watching people take pictures of each other in front of the huge mound of worn clothes was eery. On the other hand, I felt a sudden warm and irresistible connection to the little kid who picked up her younger toddler brother and pretended to throw him onto the pile – to his immense delight.

The framed quandrangle spaces are much more individual – fewer people walk there, they walk alone, and they walk in silence, as if among gravestones. Those empty clothes, laid out on their front, all pointing forwards, toward the huge mound, don’t resemble corpses at all – but seem to touch a deep fear inside us, of anonymity, genocide, impersonal death by number.

The huge industrial crane that supposedly picks up the clothes from the mound and drops them haphazardly, indicating the randomness of death, was not working when we visited. But the experience was intense, desolate, and I rather imagined its terrifying robotic movement like the breathing of this installation – more terrible than if it had been working.

We walked out very quietly, moved and troubled.

Becoming a Possibilian in 2010

The Jill Magid exhibition called Authority to Remove - which finishes today at Tate Modern - is a brilliant reflection on the possible relationships between art and secrets, between artistic freedom and institutional power. Tate describes the exhibition thus:

Authority to Remove marks the final chapter of American artist Jill Magid's long involvement with the Dutch secret service, the AIVD. In 2005, she was commissioned by the AIVD (De Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst) to create an artwork for their new headquarters. This unlikely-seeming invitation came about as the result of a stipulation under Dutch law that a portion of the budget for the new building be spent on an art commission.

In her notes, the artist recounts the process of becoming art thus:

We want you to think of the book as an object of art. We will redact it and put it inside the vitrine with your notebooks where it will remain, permanently.

You want me to put it under glass

so that it will no longer function

as a book but as a sculpture?

Yes. He blinks his eyes rapidly.

It becomes an object of art.

The Director follows this in a soft,

imploring voice.

Will you consider that, Jill?'

(from the Epilogue p. 187)

By displaying her novel as a sculpture on a plinth,

in compliance with the Dutch secret service's

request, Magid's book is transformed

from a narrative into an art object.

Displayed in this way, it can no longer be read,

its secrets secure. The body of the book ripped

from spine becomes a metaphor for the

artist's experience – she has surrendered her first

novel but how can she surrender her memory?

The exhibition got me thinking about the gaps, the missing bits

in our text of life, the things we don't understand, the photographic

negatives - the black silhouettes of experience, I guess we could say.

Hence the weather vane. (The word hence indicating a very

solipsistic logic...apologies. If we think differently, just enjoy

the weather vanes.)

When I first began to think about stories, and how we encounter narrative within a physical dimension, I was in Milan, and I was working in theatre. Nowadays the narrative I work with is not told or acted, but displayed andobjectified.

So when the story is an artwork that reflects on the missing bits - as in Magid's Becoming Tarden (subtitle The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation)... well, it is, like all the great epics, all great theatre, all great television plots, ultimately a reflection on death. The negative of our life is by definition - and since hundreds of years before Christian times - exemplified by the concept of death.

Death has been the most tremendously effective tool for narrative plots and myths across all cultures - and a scientifically proven fact for just as long.

Follow me once again down the path of BT-logic, if you will.

Scientists seem to reflect less on death than storytellers, artists and humanists. (I am sure this is a controversial statement, but I admit to not being enough of a scientist to know for sure - let's say this is my impression). But what scientists do just as well as artists, is reflect on possibilities. And hence my other inspiration for the New Year comes from David Eagleman's book Sum, forty tales from the afterlives,a neuroscientific exploration of 40 scenarios of the afterlife - all imaginative, all provocative, and funny.

I will, for 2010, define myself as a possibilian, following in Mr Eagleman's footsteps and attempting to see the afterlife and death as the other side of the coin of life, a way of enriching every living moment and offering us a lens through which to view our shared condition humaine.

Best wishes for the new decade.