A good friend has an eye for modern design.
He has a Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair. He finds it beautiful, a triumph of design. He can speak to the integrated and purified design concepts behind the slightly curved X-shape of the legs, the cubic simplicity of the repeated forms in the cushion and back, the use of luxurious materials from the welded stainless steel to the leather padded seat. He knows the history and context of the chair, originally designed for royalty, and its associations. The chair means much to him. He finds it very comfortable, and enjoys watching television from it. The money he spent on it, he feels, is more than justified.
When I sit in it, my neck aches instantly, and I can't wait to get back out. I feel strangely vulnerable, leaning back in the thing. I don't know what to do with my arms and hands. Looking at it from a safe distance, I see a hand puppet, maybe a Venus fly trap, ready to snap shut if I get too close. Sitting in it, I feel like a pearl in an open clamshell. If I had the $6500 necessary to buy a reproduction from Knoll, I would instead spend it on a a Hector Guimard dining chair. Though it's even less comfortable, and I'd likely never sit in it, it has some visual interest for me. But then again, I wouldn't buy the chair. It's appeal is mostly visual, and I can look at it in a picture all day long. Instead, I'd invest in a set of original Hogarth prints, perhaps "The Rake's Progress," which I could study up close on a wall at my leisure, revel in the detail that's hard to see on a screen, and, from the genuine article so close at hand, maybe feel a tiny connection with that age.
Simply put, you could say, I don't have an eye for (some) modern design. From there we can move past slippery questions of taste, and leave Kant's Critique of Judgement on the bookshelf, and address more pressing topics such as what's for lunch.
Yes, the body calls. It has needs. It trumps the brain when the brain wants to play in the heady realm of abstract concepts. What is good design? Are there universals? Damn it, I want a toasted tomato and cheese sandwich. Mmmmmmmmm.
I am reading a nearly unreadable book about the ways in which the built environment affects our mental state. Strangely, it delves into Freudian and Jungian internal memory palaces of the subconscious while skipping over what I think is obvious.
Isn't the feeling of walking through a medieval Cathedral to the transept different from walking through a prison hallway towards a cell?
Duh. Of course.
We are all sensitive to our environments, some more than others. We like certain spaces, dislike others. The spaces we grew up in are familiar, and while they may not feel good, they do seem right. There is comfort in familiarity. There is anxiety in the unknown and unfamiliar.
So, big tall cathedral ceilings prompt our thoughts to think up to heaven. Our spirits soar in enclosed large spaces. Low ceilings compress us, make us feel small and trapped, and weak. Lots of ornaments on a building capture our eye and distract us. Maybe they are decadent, and corrupt our thoughts. Simple forms allow a purity of thought, help us remain morally continent. Glass lets in light, both into the building and into our soul. Right? Hmmm, well, perhaps.
Maybe you like a glass house. But what about me who doesn't?
I have yet to read a good treatise that tries to discover universal human responses to environments. One must be out there. It seems to obvious a topic not to address from a psychological, architectural, cultural, even medical points of view. Interior designers are taught which colors lead to which emotions. A fellow high school teacher once told me that a five-sided room was most conducive to learning. The King Spa just North of Chicago has a room with walls built of giant blocks of salt, said to be very therapeutic for sleep disorders and other ailments.
A tatami mat room might feel like home to a Japanese, but my knees hurt just thinking about one. I want to lean my back on something, or lie down instantly. I find the average futon hard and unforgiving, a place only for fitful sleep. Likely I don't know how to fluff them. Sleeping near the floor is fine unless there's a bit of dust, in which case I sneeze relentlessly and need tissues, which never seem at hand without a side table.
I am at home in a tall sleigh bed bed with a headboard, a bolster behind the small of my back and pillows up behind my head, and a directional light from a side table (also stocked with tissues, a glass of water, and a pile of books, so I can read comfortably until I nod off. This is a well-designed environment to me that addresses both my aesthetic pleasures as well as my bodily ones.
Unless I am traveling, in which case I delight in exploring the new and unusual. I discovered feather blankets in Germany a very long time ago, and the layers of polyester blankets that I grew up with will never be adequate any more.
My taste (emotional experience) has been shaped by my experience, by what I know, what I've known, and what I am open to know. The same is true of my friend. We simply bring very different perspectives to the Barcelona chair. But there are also universals. I will guess there are few prior experiences that would greatly affect the experience of sublimity and awe that we feel walking into a great Cathedral the first time. Maybe if we grew up in blimp hangars, we would feel less awe. Maybe if we grew up in a jail cell, we would feel sheer terror. The psychological damage of being locked in a blank rectangular space for long periods of time, denied social interaction, is well documented among American prisoners. How much different are the white-walled houses of modernist design? Quite a bit, yes, but largely only in degree, not kind. A family friend was raised in a Skinner box. She seems perfectly normal, I mean within the range of human behavior that does not end in incarceration or various degrees of suicide. Was her experience detrimental or did it contribute to her happiness? I don't know, and can't say, but I absolutely believe it contributed to who she is.
The structures we build to live and work in, from humble homes to soaring skyscrapers, each has range of effects on our emotional states, and each set depends on the elements of the space. We have aesthetic responses (beautiful, ugly), practical responses (no where to sit), and emotional responses (I feel unsafe here) to our built spaces.
Are any one range of experiences more important or valuable than any other? Yes, of course.
After reading eight chapters and 150 pages into William j. Curtis's seminal tome modern architecture since 1900, I come away impressed with his encyclopedic mind, deep understanding of the material, deft synthesis of the influences and individual achievements of various architects and movements (an endeavor very close to herding cats, I believe). It is a great book. I also note that there is so far only a discussion of the aesthetic and cultural achievements of architecture. There is little to nothing about the human use of these buildings, or the human emotional response to them. Curiously, many of the most important architectural designs were never actually built, but influence directly and solely from their sole existence as drawings.
I note this not as a criticism--for of course I know why, and value the academic and professional perspective and ambitions of great architects to create high art that reflects our age, responds to our history, is intellectually integrated and expressive in every way. It's just also curious that buildings for people to use are not judged here on how people use them, just on how the educated understand them as works of art.
We shape buildings, and our buildings shape us, to greater and lesser degrees.
What of a 736 treatise titled modern architecture since 1900 chronicling not the artistic intentions of the designers, but the emotional effects, practical use of, and other responses that the users have had to those buildings? Would the list of "the most important buildings" change?
I think of the Anish Kapoor's work The Cloud Gate (the Bean) in Millennium park here in Chicago, and how popular it is. First-timers all feel marvel and disorientation as they look for their reflection on the sides, then underneath. They all come away with curious smiles.
I think of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the fingers that touched names, the faces filled with tears I saw there, the silence among so many.
Neither of these examples of an emotional response to built environments are buildings. I choose them for their simplicity to make a point.
You don't need examples of complex environments and your complex responses to them, because you have them every day. A doorway that makes you duck. A lobby that confuses and disorients you so you always seem to end up at the wrong elevator bank. The heavy brown furniture in your parent's home that you hate and fear to inherit. The corner office with the astoundingly clear view of the city, soft carpet underfoot, muffled silent space when the door closes hermetically. The comforting creak of old wooden steps that make you feel the house is slowly collapsing with age, the way you are, and the snarky smile that brings. The gorgeous wood cabinetry in a friend's kitchen that you envy, and wish you could use every day. The stuffy air of a greenhouse. The coldness of a tile floor and granite countertops.
In India, I loved the tile floors of the hotel rooms we stayed in in Kerala, down by the beach. Cool to the bare foot, they seemed to make the rooms less hot, more bearable. But in the mountains, where the temperatures fell below freezing in the winter, those same tile floors were a menace, sucking the warmth out of you. Thick carpets and woolen socks were only a partial line of defense in a house that forever felt cold and hostile.
Had I been born and raised in such a house, would I be a colder, more hostile person? Or would I be less of a wuss, accustomed to cold feet, and have a warmer heart as a consequence?
In the heterarchical architecture of empathy, such considerations would receive equal importance with the aesthetic and cultural. So we can live in beauty both in mind, and feel it in our bodies, such is the utopian goal of this idea.
We just have to figure out a chair that both my modernist friend and I like, right?
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