GREAT MOMENTS IN ARCHITECTURE (a manifesto)

We’ve found ourselves now at a point of apathy. This is not to say the average person doesn’t tie themself into some sort of passion – be it religion, political cause, or pop star – but these are just manifestations of large scale ideas. They give significance to people by the millions. I mean to say we’ve lost care for the smaller, everyday events that truly dominate our lives without our much knowing it. What happened to the individual? I’ll stop myself before I get too general because the subject at hand is just architecture and I don’t believe it alone can amend the world. If you want to start a revolution you should try being a minister, politician, or pop star, but if you want to make the way a person goes about their everyday a bit more enjoyable then architecture is the appropriate scale. We’re constantly surrounded by the built world so why not allow an evocative emotion or two to be evoked by it.

The question now is if one can actively create the small scale moments that incrementally add to our experience and burn in our minds. Can you match that sensation of a lightening bug at dusk, unable to fly yet still pulsing a second at a time from the ground until it stops and the remaining blue sky fades to obscure the insect against the adjacent twig or leaf? If architecture can even touch on that sensation then something is right. What about the similar flashing of red lighted radio towers far in the distance that you catch at surprising moments from surprising angles and always seems to remind you of that time in your childhood riding across a freeway overpass that gave you the same such glimpse. Good architecture should read as a run on sentence.

Though architects around the world have successfully crafted the great pieces of architecture that catch our attention and cover our magazine pages, what happens when you turn the corner and run into the local office park? We have fallen too far into the “weekend mentality” of biting the bullet Monday through Friday only to enjoy Saturday and Sunday and in turn again dread the following Monday. The side streets, shopping centers, and storage sheds of the world have just as much to offer as our symphony halls. Good architecture has no beginning or end.

This is not to say that a master architect is needed to design the world. In fact it is when we try to see the world as a large canvas to be painted upon that we lose its multifaceted character. This was the failing of the International style and the shortcoming of most city planning endeavors. We are not all the same, as political correctness might imply. The world is full of inconsistencies and variables amongst its people and landscapes so let them exist and thrive in that character. Good architecture is erratic.

We must avoid, however, the manufactured character of Disney World sets that our neighborhoods and cities have become. It’s not simply architecture at issue here because most of the man made world has been filtered and focus group tested to death so that we arrive at highly polished and processed environments. Furthermore, though a building’s primary purpose is to protect us from the elements, we’ve now shielded ourselves to the point of no surprises. Hot and cold mean nothing other than that they frame 72˚ on each side of the dial. When problems do arise, we are left astonished and ill prepared. Good architecture is full of chance.

Interestingly enough though, these individual persons, buildings, and moments do not exist completely independent of each other. Everything is infinitely intertwined and the beauty is that we’re constantly ebbing and flowing alongside each other. This adds to the overall complexity. The key is to not get lost in the tide and to allow that one evocative flash of emotion to stick out in the blinking crowd every so often. With that, you revolutionize that one space on earth at that one place in time, and in that moment nothing else matters.