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!