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.