Pause to reflect

In this blog I started by exploring an early written work by Christopher Alexander, because I was attracted to his thinking and I wanted to try and understand his basic ideas.  From this start, I have so far discovered three threads.

Contemporary Housing and eco-housing

The Staiths  Gateshead    Hemingway Designs with Wimpey Homes

This has led me to look at contemporary housing  in the UK and beyond  This includes eco housing and sustainable building, self build and also temporary housing (Architecture for Humanity) 

This is a challenging and practical area, and deeply important for our society.  Kevin McCloud and his team describe the difficulties they had in applying for and gaining planning permission for the Triangle scheme in Swindon, and now for larger developments in  Oxford and Stroud.  McCloud acknowledges that the Triangle is less developed than some continental schemes in Tubingen and Stockholm which were his inspirations and which "emerged from a culture of planning and construction that is far more evolved, and far more sophisticated, than in Britain", he says (see Rowan Moore's Observer article). 

Both Wayne Hemingway and Kevin McCloud work with building firms to improve private life by the design of affordable houses and community life by creating a landscape context which encourages people to share activities.  But are they, as suggested by themselves, simply using their own experiences as the foundation of their designs?  Does this translate to all users?

Alexander is also concerned to create an environment which reflects the  reality of people's lives, but as shown in the example of the Indian village (earlier posts), his interpretation of reality is based on observation and participation.  In his later works Alexander takes a wider, almost mystical approach to architecture, which links him to:  

Philosophy of dwelling, theoretical and applied

Bleak House    Diana Hand

The challenge to build housing which "makes people happy" is huge.  McCloud thinks it is about being an active member of a community in a well designed house. But housing and its meanings are many and complex.  In his "Timeless Way of Building" and "A Pattern Language" Alexander tries to lay down principles to find the elusive element of "life" which we all recognise.   Philosophers such as Heidegger write about what it really means to dwell, what we do when we build and how it alters the meaning of a place and how we experience that.  In my next post I will discuss a paper by David Seamon which shows how Alexander's ideas can be interpreted as phenomenological in origin.

Within this category also come theories of atmosphere and the "uncanny" in buildings and in dwelling.  According to this theory, we "secrete" our being into buildings, simply by living in them, and they are privy to our innermost thoughts.  So, rather than being consumer items, they are in fact reflections of our deeper selves. Bachelard in his famous book, "The Poetics of Space" applies phenomenology to architecture to explore such ideas.  Anthony Vidler writes about the "modern unhomely" in the book "The Architectural Uncanny".  His book is a historical perspective on the idea of the "uncanny", tracing it back to the eighteenth century, and into contemporary "deconstructive" architecture.

Iconic contemporary buildings 
 

Exterior of Ronchamp chapel (Le Corbursier)

Interior of Ronchamp Chapel

A room inside the Jewish Museum, Berlin  (Daniel Libeskind)

Serpentine pavilion, London  2011   Peter Zumthor 

Serpentine Pavilion London 2012 Herzog and de Meuron with Ai WeiWei

Some architects build the excellent low cost everyday housing aspired to by McCloud and Wayne Hemingway, some design special buildings which actually explore the sense of place and how materials and location combine to achieve that.  Examples here are Ronchamp (Le Corbusier), the Jewish Museum in Berlin (Libeskind), Serpentine Pavilion 2011 (Zumthor) and perhaps the Serpentine Pavilion of 21012 (Herzog and de Meuron with Ai WeiWei). There are many many other examples.  Often the living presence of a building or place arrives through use, or historical accident or long association, rather than by conscious design.  Seamon explains this in phenonomenological terms.

But these, although fascinating,  are essentially public spaces.  A different challenge from building an everyday environment for the process of dwelling!