Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

To set out on a journey is one of life’s great pleasures, holding out as it does the prospect of making discoveries and finding fresh stimulation; and returning home is also a pleasure, but of a different order. We would feel more distress if we were unable to return home than if we had never managed to set out, because ‘home’ is such an important reference point, and if we are deprived of it then we have incalculable problems of disorientation, which do not end when we find a new shelter. Moving house involves vague but persistent feelings of things not being quite right, which are quite different from knowing that one is visiting a strange place and will return home tomorrow. It involves finding a new set of habits, and therefore becoming a slightly different person. The building is only part of the story. It is caught up in a variety of activities, both physical and mental, that influence how we feel about that particular place. Architecture involves this cultural aspect of buildings, which can range from something very personal and idiosyncratic to something that everyone seems to agree upon. We are shaped by the culture that we grow up in, and by the culture in which we participate, whether we think about it or not — and most of the time we don’t think about it at all. In fact we are least aware of this at home. It is when we travel that we see that other people do things differently, and this can be disconcerting. In a western shopping mall we do not expect to be touched, but in a North African souk the shopkeepers sometimes reach out and tap your elbow or grasp your arm, to attract attention, which I found disconcerting. It upset my ingrained sense of what was proper, and because all the shopkeepers seemed to do it, it felt as if there was a conspiracy, compounded of course by the fact that they spoke to one another in a secret language that I didn’t understand. This trivial paranoia is dispelled with a little knowledge and a little thought, but the ingrained instincts affect one’s feelings before the rational thought does: I felt threatened, and knew that I shouldn’t, but had to keep telling myself not to feel that way. The feeling wears off after a while, and if I had been brought up in the other culture, it would have been the self-evidently ‘natural’ way to behave, and I might have wondered when I visited a western shopping mall, why everyone was avoiding me: what did they think was wrong with me? In architecture, as in any other culture, our sense of ‘how things should be’ develops from our experience. Each gesture that we make means something, but the meaning depends on the culture in which the gesture is understood. Architecture is gesture made with buildings.

Cultures in the plural

A culture, in the sense that I mean here, need not involve a great many people. It might be vague and vast, as it would be if one were to want to contrast European culture with that of, say, Latin America; but equally, it might just involve a few people who have something in common and who therefore exchange glances and knowing smiles when, say, a teacher or an elderly relative says something that was not intended to be obscene, but is to those who hear the double entendre and absolutely must not laugh. Here there would be a single utterance, heard in two cultures of interpretation. In this sense we are involved with different cultures in different parts of our lives, when we deal with different groups of people. We are routinely accustomed to behaving in different ways in different settings, without particularly thinking about it. When the circumstances are familiar, we know how we expect ourselves to behave. We treat people we know well differently from strangers. We sit differently on public transport and on the sofa at home. We are comfortable saying some things to our friends, and a different range of things to our parents. We have a sense of decorum for our behaviour, and sense much the same with buildings. Some buildings seem to do the right thing, and we are comfortable with them, even if we don’t pay them much attention. Others might seem awkward or wrong. For example there would be something wrong if a private house looked like a high street shop, and seemed to be trying to encourage people to come across the threshold to explore. The problem wouldn’t just be the practical one, that people kept walking into the house, because that could be solved by keeping the door locked. The architectural problem is at a cultural level: the building would be making the wrong sort of gesture for a house.