Architecture... ahhh... alright, I suppose

So… let’s talk architecture!  Now, don’t all of you go jumping up and down in excitement.  I just want to start a dialogue about my favorite subject.  Listen in if you wish, but try to keep an open mind, because so much of our lives is affected by the structures that surround us. 

I don’t broach this subject solely because it’s my field, but primarily because it integrally affects all of us.  We all work, play, worship, escape to, relax and simply live the vast majority of our lives in buildings, whether we notice them or not.  Some of those buildings are fantastic, uniquely and specially designed.  They are buildings that enrich our lives, enlighten us through the spirit that they convey by their use of light, space, and materials.  They lift us up through the experience of just walking through them.  If you’ve ever passed through Grand Central Station in New York, or ridden to the top of the Saint Louis Arch, or walked out onto the terrace of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spectacular Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania, then you know exactly what I mean. 

Grand Central Station - photo by author

And yet so many of those buildings in our lives are rather humdrum, mediocre experiences.  You may work in a standard suburban office building, maybe spending all day inside an 8’x8’ cubicle, that you arrived at after walking down a 5 foot wide double-loaded corridor (more on those at another time), having come up to your second floor office level after walking through a standard suburban office park atrium lobby, typically an open-air two story space with some minor planter in the corner, a faux, over-designed chandelier hovering over the middle of the space, the open-tread stairs off to the side, all of it ensconced in hard surfaces made of mostly metamorphic stones and tiles.  Each of these spaces looking so similar to so many others.

My point is that we don’t have to passively accept such mediocrity in our lives.  We should demand more.  But what is more?  And how do we ask for it?  In order to get better buildings, we have to know what better buildings are.  I would like to contribute to that conversation starting now.  I don’t claim to be the leading expert on anything, but I do know a thing or two about buildings, and that’s what I want all of us to start talking about.  How do you look at a building critically?  How do you judge its timelessness and its utility?  How do you make sense of its worth vs. its cost?  And while we're at it, we'll talk about cities as well.  And maybe we'll even get sidetracked on occasion and talk about buildings in movies and other such stuff.  

I want to begin sharing some ideas about all of these things and more, because they affect all of us in ways subtle and not so subtle.  Architecture is all around you.  In order to take it in, all you have to do is open up your eyes and open up your mind.  In the end, I guess the thing that I can most hope to accomplish is that I get as many people as I can to start looking beyond themselves and truly see the structures that surround them and maybe we'll all start to appreciate the built environment just a bit more.