Christopher Day PLACES SOUL Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art & THE AQUARIAN PRESS9 Ensouling Buildings If you stand in front of, or go into, a new building nowadays the usual experience is one of emptiness. It waits for someone to come along and give it love, cosines, individu- ality, to put curtains in the win- dows, flowers on the balcony, life in the rooms. And so it should! Until that someone comes along, however, many buildings are life- less. They offer nothing other than constraints and architectural quali- ties — space, light and so on — to build upon, to work together with. Such buildings have not yet started the process of being ensouled. So what is this process of giving a building a soul? Soul can incarnate progressively into a building as it progressively gains substance from wish, through idea, planning, constructional design, building and occupation. Each stage develops, deepens and extends that which had come before. They are not stages which alternate from aesthetic to practical but, with these aspects inseparable throughout, are stages of continu- ous process of incarnation into sub- 106 stance until we architects complete our task, leaving a shell for life which will continue to grow. It is conspicuous that buildings which have been designed and built without care, or where their tenancy and management structure dis- courages tenant care, replacing it with dependency on a faceless or exploitive owner, rapidly deteriorate into slums. A generation ago, slums used to mean buildings with phys- ical deficiencies. Today’s slums are buildings from which care is absent. Old buildings are rarely just museums of a particular period of history. They have physical ele- ments from many dates right up to the present and they have the imprint — both visibly and invisi- bly — of the many occupants, lifestyles and values that inhabited them. When this has been a har- monious progression, the new built upon the past rather than brutally pushing it aside, ripping it out and trampling it, these buildings have charm and appeal. People choose old buildings to live in. Of course people alsofirmness, of structural meaning (as a wooden boat is) then they look really wonderful. I am not averse to curved wood, but the curves need strength. If you steam or cut curves by hand, the limitations of tools and materials give this strength. If you have the freedom of a jig- or band- saw, they only will if you have first learnt with hand tools. Wood allows longer horizontal runs of windows without any visual ENSOULING BUILDINGS loss of structural strength. Some- times, even, the windows are the structure. Wood is for life above the ground. It needs a masonry bas¢ to root it in the earth — a heavy in- ward-leaning base, preferably part- covered with vegetation. The linear characteristics of wood can be exag- Timber allows long horizontal openings to appear quite natural; not so masonry where vertical openings make better structural sense.PLACES OF THE SOUL gerated or softened by colour — white fascias and corner boards emphasize the lines which enclose shapes more than do any other colour (except perhaps yellow or orange). Low pigment stains and, particularly, unstained natural weathering soften the effects of shape. Even very square buildings blend gently into the landscape when they are weathered grey: it is such a life-filled grey, quite unlike grey paint! Unfortunately though, it is not always the best thing for the wood. I don’t think that I am alone in feeling at home with natural materials. By ‘natural’ I mean of course modified nature. The tree is sawn and planed, carth baked into bricks and tiles and so on, but there is still a strong link between finished appearance (and sometimes feel and smell) and natural origins. Natural materials are ‘natural’ for human environment. They help to give us roots. The need for roots has led to revivals of past styles of architecture — but, however skil- fully they are recreated, when revivalist forms are built in modern materials — reinforced concrete, glass-reinforced plastic, imitation stone, wood laminates — they look as fake and hollow as they sound when you tap them. One aspect of traditional build- ing materials is that they are all bound by the scale of the human body: bricks are sized to be laid by hand, prefabricated panels by crane. Compared to ordinary concrete paving slabs (not my favourite material), concrete pavements cast in situ, sectioned only by expansion joints, are a huge step away from 116 human scale. A large, simple roof can be at least acceptable if not attractive in subtly variegated tiling but is dominating and_place- sterilizing if in uniform asphalt. Anthropometric measurements such as the imperial system, and even more so the ell,” imprint the measurements of the body into a building. Our main concern how- ever is how many body heights something is, how much above eye level, how many paces away, how much within or beyond our reach. When we design things on paper we tend to consider dimensions arithmetically. 2.2 metres is a mere 10 per cent longer than 2 metres. In life, however, we experience dimen- sion anthropometrically. A standard door opening is 2 metres high. 10 per cent higher it is almost at (com- mon) ceiling level; we would hardly experience passing under it. 10 per cent lower and — at least psycho- logically — we need to duck under it. These few centimetres hardly noticeable on the drawing, make all the difference. (We can achieve both safety and threshold experience if we arch the opening so that it is high enough to pass through but feels lower.) Similarly, an inch more or less on the rise of a step makes a dramatic difference to the ex- perience of going up or down stairs. Small measurements in relation to eye level are critical to views and privacy. A few inches in the height of walls profoundly alters our spa- tial experience. We also experience 2 Ell: fingertip to elbow measurement. It is particularly useful when laying stonework asa quick guide to the size of stones needed to complete a courseobjects anthropometrically. We can experience a sugar cube within the hand, and something larger within our arm encompass, but when an object is just a bit bigger so that we can no longer see or feel it without walking round it, we start to experience it differently. Even the smallest buildings like bus-shelters are in this scale, but when design- ing it is very hard not to draw, model, experience and think of them as immediately comprehensi- ble objects. How big a building appears in the landscape is affected both by the proportion of roof to wall and by Buildings of comparable volume can have markedly different perceived sizes: walls con- front the observer and imply used space within much more than do roofs. Further- more, perspective effects can reduce the appar- ent height of roof ridges ENSOULING BUILDINGS the time of year. Walls confront one whereas the roof slides away and also has a perspective reduction. The gesture of a steep roof can tie a building down to the ground whereas a shallow one with deep eaves can frame and emphasize a wall. ! In towns, where views are often so hemmed in that we are not aware of the upper parts of buildings unless we look along streets, other factors are involved in perceived scale. Horizontal distance in rela- tionship to event, textural scale and comparative sizes of distinct build- ing units, vegetation and visible sky are more significant. Where we can see them, parapet skylines tend to increase apparent size and therefore ‘urban-ness’; visible (therefore fairly steeply-pitched) roofs do the reverse. Where we may wish to d17PLACES OF THE SOUL Snow banks can make a striking difference to the apparent scale of things. reduce apparent density, with its close association with crowding stress, we may choose pitched roofs; where city-centre stimulation is a priority, they might not be so appropriate. Seasonal growth or snow banks can make a striking difference to the apparent scale of things. The walls of traditional buildings with their low doorways and eaves were lower than some annual plants. In some three weeks of early summer or one night of snowfall, such buildings could change from focal points to the barely visible. Human life also, in its relation to the forces of nature, experienced the same dramatic rhythmic swings. Nowadays we have evened out these experiences; enlarging buildings, raising eaves, cultivating low gardens — often only mown grass — and imposing 118 regular patterns of work regardless of Séason. Nowadays many people seek to find roots in tradition, in tracing their family histories. The life- renewing rhythms of nature root us in time and place. But how many urban children even know that grass can flower? Every half month has a definably different quality to the preceding and following half month. Almost every week of the year is distinct, yet in many you can only experience seasons. When I lived in London the months had no individuality — they were just sum- mer and winter. It is the progression of nature's rhythms in one place that is so root- ing, centring, stabilizing. Travelling to find seasons — especially out-of- season, such as winter holidays on the beach in Tunisia or early sum- mer skiing in Northern Scandina- via — is like buying vegetables out of season — and as crazily drivenby cconomic reasons. To make money, farmers and market gardeners try to produce food out of season when the price is higher; often by the time the food reaches the kitchen it is hardly recogniza- ble as anything that ever grew in the land — and neither is the tourist hotel ina fishing village or the ski- resort on summer-grazing pasture. To redress this de-rooting of every- day life, I have been asked to design The apparent size of a building appears to vary with the seasons. Annual plants can grow to human height in barely a month; leaf transforms a branched stick to a heavily laden tree able to completely conceal a scale- dominating object which appears large in the bare winter. Snow can also change the scale and focus of things. ENSOULING BUILDINGS farms where city children can come to experience where food comes from, what happens at what time of year, how it is done, how they can do it — to find roots in life. Places give roots to people, anchors which we need so much in rootless times when one after another codes of behaviour, estab- lished institutions, ways of looking at the world are called into question. Personal identity, marriage stabil- ity, expectations of employment — all seem so much less certain than they did to our parents. Buildings threaten and destroy or add to and create places. Their first responsibility must be to add to places, to nurture the spirit of place — which in turn nurtures us. The interiors of buildings also createPLACES OF THE SOUL inner places. Each room has a spirit. It starts with the architecture and develops through usage. In the dark we can go into two rooms in a strange house — one is a bathroom, one a bedroom. We know instantly which is which; we can hear the acoustic difference. The architectural differences start with the senses. But there can also be rooms with similar spatial charac- teristics — say two identical prefab- ricated buildings in an army camp: one is a chapel, one a lecture room —a place for peace and a place for war-instruction. A difference in spirit begins to be noticeable. When the building has been used for generations — a church or torture chamber for instance — the feeling of this spirit is stronger. The place becomes imprinted by a spirit. ‘However much it becomes a chrome and plastic city, who can visit Hiroshima without remem- bering? As places build up their soul atmosphere to support a spirit of place, so too do rooms within one building: this room, for instance, or even part of room, is a hearth, the warm social heart of a home, not just the centre of a house. Nowadays space is expensive to build. We design therefore in time and space; some rooms are multi- used. We think of time-space management. Indeed, sometimes I tell my clients that what they need is not more space but a different timetable. Most built spaces are empty more than they are in use, but we need to think first about the spirit of these places before we make any decisions about multi- use. 120 Some of these ‘spirits of place’ are resilient, allowing places to be used for many purposes Others are more fragile. A cross-country run does not do so much harm to woodland and farmland but to a wild, empty, lonely mountain it leaves a long echo of use; not appreciation, but exploitation! Even amongst people who will not admit to anything spiritual in our surroundings, many recognize that the gambling machines cannot be satisfactorily moved into a meditation centre when it is not in use. In the same way, the protective tranquillity of a kindergarten is threatened when it is used for excitable debates about economic survival in the evenings. Architecturally, what can we do to help nurture this spirit of place? Externally it is a matter of conver- sation between what already is and what we bring afresh with a new idea — an idea inspired out of the future, inspired from beyond the physical earth. Internally the occu- pants will be bounded by fixed physical restraints — walls, floor, ceiling. We need to bring in some- thing enlivening, changing, renew- ing, something with a cosmic rather than just a human-usage rhythm; and that, of course, is natural light. We tend to think of architecture as substance, but this substance is just the lifeless mineral vessel. Light is the life-giving clement and both in quality and quantity it is abso- lutely central to our wellbeing. While light affects all aspects of mind and body, its effects are most pronounced upon the feelings. Just as warmth is related to activity and will (as you notice if you try to work in an overheated room) soIf we work sensitively with light, texture and space, even if only simply, even the more mundane rooms can be ensouled, can be wel- coming, supportive places without the need to personalize and enliven them by adding objects, decorations, possessions. If we do not work consciously with these soul qualities we can hope to provide no better than the every- day norm: architecture which encourages the tendency to acquisitive materialism because of the need to humanize places. light is related to the feeling realm, so much so that we often describe light in terms which we describe our own moods, like ‘gloomy’ or ‘gentle’, ‘harsh’ or ‘warm’. Inadequate light has been linked with depression and suicide statis- tics; however, we must not just think of light as a matter of physi- cal quantity but as a life-bearing principle. We can enhance this life by how we texture, shape and colour the substance that frames and receives the light; for we can- not see light itself, only its meeting with substance. Some quite attrac- ENSOULING BUILDINGS tive materials drink up light, leav- ing a place gloomy even with bright windows; misplaced or shallow-set windows lacking tonal transition, harsh geometry and gloss reflection all tend in the same direction. Light gives life to a room. There can be too much — window walled classrooms used to be the fashion — or too little. Rooms without natural light — here I think of the movement to classrooms with no windows at all — can have very dis- turbing effects upon physical, men- tal and social health. Laboratory rats in these circumstances attack each other or damage themselves. Some observers notice similar behaviour in those windowless schools. The amount of window area we need to achieve particular lighting levels varies according to geo- graphy, orientation, climate and surrounding vegetation and topog- raphy as well as to the design of rooms and placing of windows. The amount of light we need likewise 121PLACES OF THE SOUL varies according to where we are in the world. City dwellers need more, so do those who live in northern latitudes or under predominantly grey skies, while towards the Medi- terranean slatted shutters are used to darken rooms. It is easy to tell when there is not enough light in a room, when the windows are too small, but harder when they are too big. In Holland there are often a lot of plants and trees right outside the windows; the windows are big but the rooms gently lit. Candle-light gives life to a dark room which, poorly lit by a weak electric bulb, would be depressingly gloomy, and this is also the case with a sunbeam re- flected off white-washed walls. To give life to a room it is much more a matter of quality than quantity. The human spirit needs this life- filled light. The soul needs it. Even the body needs it for physical health. Sky-light from different direc- tions and sunlight at different times of day have different qualities which breathe into our states of being throughout each day. Quantita- tively west light may be the same as east. In quality they are distinctly different. Interrelated with warmth and life in outer nature the light of the seasons awakens us physically in the summer. In the winter its withdrawal awakens us to more inner activity. Religious buildings — temples, cathedrals, stone circles — were built to correspond with chosen points in these great cosmic rhythms. Even today, simply for reasons of delight to the soul, we orientate windows to catch the sun- 122 Sunlight through vegetation gives gentle colour and modulation to the light in a room. rise early in the year and to be filled with water-reflected light at mid- summer noon and direct, deeply penetrating sunbeams in the winter. We can work with reflection. It needs care, however; reflection from snow can warm a solar collector or lighten a dark room, but the light is cold and there can be dazzle and glare problems. Reflections from mirrors can cause problems of deceptive space. Some designers like to play with this, but being deceived does not strengthen a sense of roots. We can also use reflection from natural materials and from paint. As I have mentioned, the delicate breath of lazure colour gives more life to the light than heavy opaque paint which emphasizes that static impenetrability of surfaces. Once we think of reflection, wethink of material and substance. The right materials make a building. In the days of black and white if I pho- tographed an attractive village street the photograph would often show mediocre architecture. The colour, light effects of sunlight and materials, not to mention its un- photographable sensory richness, made the place. Materials and light are two com- pletely opposite poles which belong together. Thick walls with sun- beams through deep windows, dark rocks in luminously still water, trees fringed with light against the sun: these joy the heart. The unphoto- graphable because they are alive. Light and matter is the greatest of architectural polarities — the polar- ity of cosmos and substance, one bringing enlivening, renewing thythms, the other stable, enduring, rooted in place and time. This polarity is the foundation of health- ENSOULING BUILDINGS giving architecture, for the oneness of stability, balance and renewal underlies health. The ancient druids worked with this polarity with rock and sun, for in the tension between them health- giving life arises. I also try to work with it in a qualitative way, and it is sensitivity to qualities that has led me in this direction rather than thinking my way. I started just by having a feeling for these things. I have therefore made a lot of mis- takes, but the process I have gone through is similar to that with which one needs to nurture a spirit of place. It starts with developing a feel- ing for what is the appropriate mood, then building a strong soul of a place with materials and ex- periences of appropriate sensory qualities. It starts with the feelings; architecture built up out of adjec- tives — architecture for the soul. 123choose to live in other sorts of buildings, but for other reasons. What I have described for buildings also applies to landscapes: every- thing new that we build will be set in a landscape or townscape that already exists and which has been made up by a long historical process. What we tend to call sites are already places, places to which their histories have given soul and spirit. The soul of a place is the intan- gible feeling — made up of so many things — that it conveys. It is for instance sleepy, smells of pine trees, is friendly, airy, quiet, its roads and paths do not hurry but turn slightly so that everything can always be secn anew cach time you pass. Upon this composite of sensory ex- periences, reinforced by historical associations (‘under this clock is where couples always met, even my grandparents’, ‘this is where the great ships were built’ etc.) we begin to feel that there is something special about this place, unique, liv- ing and evolving, but enduring beyond minor change. It is a being in itself. I call this the spirit of a place. Every place should have a spirit; indeed, unless it has been destroyed by brutal unresponsive actions, every place does. Children know every corner of the little piece of land they play on. It gives them happiness and health forces they will carry into later life. To the small child it is a whole world, every part an individuality and large in area. Revisit it as an adult and it seems tiny. Revisit it as a site manager and ‘here we can stack the concrete units, here the reinforcing steel; we need only to ENSOULING BUILDINGS level the site first’. Nowadays so much land is used, so little appre- ciated. When we think of projects these days — urban redevelopment, housing estates, motorway junc- tions, oil terminals, airports — how many places with a special, unique, valuable and health-giving spirit cease to exist? Whenever we build something new we have a respon- sibility to this spirit of place. A responsibility to add to it. To the Ancient Greeks the sense of these beings was so strong that in partic— ular places they could say ‘here lives the god’. They then enclosed and strengthened this being with a temple. Today our buildings serve differ- ent functions — inside and outside ones. Inside is to house an idea, say a clinic, a shop, a home. Outside they bound, articulate, focus or alter an external space, adding to or detract- ing from what is already there, the spirit of place. Many outside spaces serve both functions — an ‘idea’ function (like a meditation garden, private courtyard or car park) and a ‘response to place’ function. Because the inside space, activi- ties and qualities of a building and the outside surfaces and appearance are interrelated, the whole building and all the activities it generates need to be involved in this great conversation. The conversation between idea, usage and_ place, between what will be and what already was. Between physical sub- stance — the materialization of the idea — and invisible spirit of place — the spirit brought into being by the physical substance of the sut- roundings. This is a fundamental 107PLACES OF THE SOUL Topographical features can suggest where a building should be placed, and tie it into the landscape, so that it looks as though it was always there. responsibility in any architectural action. At first sight it might seem. too big a responsibility to cope with, but I don’t approach it like that. What I do first is try to listen to the place, listen to the idea and find ways in which they are at least compatible. At best they can sym- biotically reinforce each other. Then I try to design a building which has the appropriate qualities. In a land- scape, this often requires a building which is as small in scale as possi- ble. This can be achieved for in- stance with low eaves, preferably below eye-level, or by tucking the building into the landform or plac- ing it so as to extend or turn the lines of hedgerows or landform features. Townscape situations have differ- ent requirements. Perhaps the crit- ical issue might be to find the right scale and intensity of visible activity while at the same time minimizing adverse effects like shading or noise, especially in the more sensitive 108 neighbouring zones. Enclosure, compression, openness, sunlight, activity, vegetation, airways, acous- tic textures (like plank pavements) and so on are all things that a place can ask for, that can bring a benefit to what already is. Light (including colour), life (especially vegetation), air quality and noise reduction (especially mechanical acoustic noise, but also sensory, especially visual ‘noise’) and spatial variety, meaningful to the soul, are likely to be amongst the critical elements. The building itself needs appro- priate qualities which both add to how it looks from outside and colour the activities within and around it (these activities may well have a greater impact on the sur- roundings than the building itself will!). It needs a meaningful choice of materials. Traditionally materials | found in the surroundings were raised artistically to become build- ings. Today we are free to use any- thing. But to fit, the materials need to feel right for the place. When I go to a new site, I can feel for exam- ple, a stone or a wooden buildingENSOULING BUILDINGS would be right here; or perhaps for this use, the building needs to assert its purposes a little more and should be rendered block; here it should be more urban in character — brick perhaps? A building needs forms and shapes — outlines — roof and eaves lines which relate to (not necessar- ily copy) or perhaps contrast the surroundings. These, combined with plan shape, create the appro- priate gestures: of welcome, of privacy, of activity, of repose. These in turn are part of the experience of approaching and entering a build- ing. Roads, paths, boundaries (such as fences or woodland edge) and topographic features (such as the junction of sloping and level land) tie a building into the landscape. The ‘keyline’ system of erosion con- trol and fertility building is gener- ated from the ‘key’ topographic Existing features, such as roads and hedge- rows, not only tie a building into a place; they can suggest, even ask that it be there. 109PLACES OF THE SOULmeeting point between steep and flattening slope.’ The placing of woodland, roads and fences is crit- ical. It is no coincidence that these can make a development belong to a place or, if unconsidered, assault it spiritually and ecologically. They are all features which are either already there and anchor that which is new, or are implied by the rela- tionship between the existing situ- ation and the new building. I notice that, quite unconsciously, I often prefer to locate buildings on the edge of a site where there is something, a wall perhaps or meet- ing point of different qualities of place, out of which the building can grow. There will also be more open space left on site to do something attractive with, and not just bits of left-over space all around the building. In built-up areas where open space and sunlight are at such a premium, buildings placed to dominate the site are spatially — and in this commercial world monetarily an extravagance we can rarely afford. Buildings sited to give priority to the place they bound make better environmental and eco- nomic sense. As one approaches a building there is a moment when you come to be aware of the influence of its activities. This is a threshold. It is the place for a bridge or archway, cither built, formed of trees meeting over- head or implied by buildings com- ' This system, developed by P.A. Yeomans for Australian climatic conditions, has been widely and successfully used to reclaim and improve dryland prone to infrequent but destructively heavy rain. ENSOULING BUILDINGS pressing and focusing space. There are other ways of giving emphasis to this threshold, like using a turn in the path around a building corner, a group of trees or slope of land, a change in-ground surface such as from long to mown grass or gravel to brick paving. Gates and Even in a small country like Britain much land is wasted. They are the forgotten spaces: behind the garden shed, the other side of the factory fence, behind the dustbins. Some are miniature wildlife havens but most are just places of squalor. Children need such hid- den places, but not the ugliness, the excreta of society. Turning our backs on things, pretending they do not exist, is quite the opposite from not interfering with a place. Britain can justly be proud of its tradition of backs to’ houses: many countries have fronts all round, But a house back is the front to more private and less conformist activities. It is the lifeless backs that I am concerned about — so much land in despair that could be home to life.PLACES OF THE SOUL steps are traditional threshold markers. If we are to bring anything new to a place and make it better, not worse, that new thing must have an tistic quality. Art starts when inspiration struggles with the con- straints of matter. When the painter paints, any pre-formed idea has to give way to what is developing on the canvas; matter and spirit become interwoven into a single whole. The idea on its own existed outside the sphere of earthly reality or life — the painting process gives it reality and life. This process applies as much in architecture as in any other art. First someone perceives a need, some- times a set of needs; then comes the idea — how to satisfy this need; then an architectural concept; then a building plan, constructional design, a period of building longer and using more energy and money than the previous planning stages; then use — even longer and where the building affects the occupants and users every day! Conventionally, artistic design stops at or only a little beyond the planning stage. But most of the work is still to come. If any product is to be artistic, the people who make it need to be involved in the artistic process. Of course, builders have not necessarily gone through the same process of developing their aesthetic sensitivities as have architects, but there are other ways to look at it. It is often said: ‘What is wrong with this region is that there is no overall planning!” We live daily in localized experience, all influenced by a regional structure. Our local 112 world is the victim or beneficiary of mega-decisions: after Regional Planning comes District Planning (we begin to see the consequences here) — then architecture. Archi- tects tend to agree how important this is. Then the textures, loving craftsmanship (or otherwise) with which things are built, then fur- and building maintenance. Then homemaking — both at home and at work — perhaps the most impor- tant stage of all that makes places welcoming and our lives a pleasure — or not! If left out, it undoes all the good built up so far. Generations of care and life-give old buildings their charm; lack of it turns them rapidly into slums. The architectural qualities have but a small part to play in this spirit that grows up in places. I am reminded of this every time I see an attractive but empty holiday home. Yet it is everything that has gone before that influences whether places will be loved and cared for or resented and abused. Only for a century or so has this whole process been compart- mentalized so that aesthetics is res- tricted to the architectural stage. Yet great ideas badly, carelessly, love- lessly built are awful to live in! Many qualities depend upon how they are made. Many of the finer qualities of a space — the complexity of meeting forms and planes, the metamorpho- sis of one shape, form, space into another, the effects of natural and artificial light — can only be approximately and inadequately anticipated. They must be made. Dead straight lines are so dead. To give them life they need to be not wobbly, random or weak but madeThe attitude, artistic and care-filled or other- wise, with which a building is built makes all the difference to the end product. with a feeling hand. Made. This is the sphere where only the building workers can make or break a build- ing. When you make things with your own hands you just can’t make satisfactorily the same form in differ- ent materials. It feels different, needs a different structure and form. Making and building things is the stage at which idea meets material. They can either com- promise each other or, through their fusion, reach a higher level. Sculp- ture in the mind is pointless. With- out art, stone fresh from the quarry is little more than a pile of broken rock. It is, however, a little more than just a pile because each material already has something in it waiting to find an appropriate place and ENSOULING BUILDINGS form. Not every stone has Michel- angelo’s David in it, but every stone has a quality of ‘stoneness’. The vio- lence of the quarry leaves it with sharp split surfaces, but the quality of enduring rock can be refound. All materials have individual qualities. Wood is warm, it has a life to it even though the tree is long felled; brick still has, to touch and to the eye, some of the warmth of the brick kiln; steel is hard, cold, bearing the impress of the hard, powerful industrial machines that rolled or pressed it; plastic has something of the alien molecular technology of which it is made, standing outside the realm of life and, like reinforced concrete, bound by no visible structural rules. It is out of these qualities that materials speak. It is hard to make a cold- feeling room out of unpainted wood, hard to make a warm, soft, approachable room out of concrete. Materials are the raw ingredicnts of art. But already they affect our emotions. Mediocre architecture on ascale that is not oppressive is really quite pleasant in timber or a well- chosen brick but a disaster in con- crete or asbestos-cement panel. On the whole, people don’t look at architecture, nor at materials. They breathe it in. It provides an atmosphere, not a pictorial scene. When you look at a photograph of an attractive place you notice how much of the picture is ground sur- face. Our field of vision usually includes more ground than sky. Our feet walk on it. The materials of the ground surface are at least as important as those of the walls. Beyond individual personal preferences we respond to the his- 143PLACES OF THE SOUL Above Much more than the architecture, it is the materials and play of light upon them that make the atmosphere of this place. Below Ground texture and vegetation are often the most expendable items of an archi~ tectural budget. Yet they can be the most economical and effective elements in making a place. 114 tory and ‘being’ of the material printed into its appearance. Our feelings are not random but relate to how appropriate this ‘being’ is to our needs of soul. They also are closely interwoven with the effects that the material has on the body. Biologically and emotionally metal, reinforced concrete and plas- tic are not good materials to live within, but wood is — very much so. Nowadays when we think of wood we picture not the curving branches and forks chosen by the shipwrights and early framed-house builders but machine-extruded strips. These lend themselves well to planes but poorly to curves — the opposite of brick where curves can give such strength you can’t push over a tall narrow wall. In wood, I usually make curved gestures out of straight lines. Three- facet arches, polygonal spaces give much firmer forms than jigsaw-cut curves. They well suit its softer, more approachable surface. Curves can look silly made up out of planks, but when they are curves of13 Building for Tomorrow Most of us spend most of our time in, near or influenced by built sur- toundings. We spend our lives in what were once the thoughts of architects’ Our thoughts, our ‘designs, make the world of tomor- tow. If we think about it, this is a terrible responsibility; if we don’t, there is no reason to suppose that it will be any less terrible a disaster than the effects of the recent past. In barely three decades architecture has destroyed cities and large areas of countryside all over the world. Pollution and environmental damage due to architectural deci- sions threaten even global ecology. The ozone depletion crisis, for example, is to a significant extent due to chlorofluorocarbons used in air conditioning and foamed insu- ' L use the word ‘architect’ throughout in its common sense meaning. Legally in Bri- tain it means only architects registered by the Architects Registration Council UK (ARCUR). Most of us however live in sur- roundings not designed by ARCUK mem- bers nor perhaps well designed, but designed none the less. 180 lation. Much nuclear-produced electricity heats buildings (espe- cially by night-storage heating).? Some materials, such as aluminium, require a lot of electrical energy to produce. Some, such as plastics, cause significant pollution in both manufacture and when their use life is over. There are other ways of heating and of cooling buildings. There are high and low pollution- price materials to choose from. Which systems and products we choose are architectural decisions. Architecture has effects on place, on life-supporting ecology, on the spirit of the world we live in — it also affects people. In recent years Britain has witnessed a government committed to changing society by changes in communal responsibil- ities and economic structures. In a * Nuclear power stations are best suited to a regular output. Peaks of demand can be topped up by conventional stations with a more flexible response. What do you do with nuclear-produced electricity when neatly everyone is in bed? Night-storage heating and attractively cheap tariffs to en- courage off-peak usage are the solution.short few years the human effects have become markedly visible, Major changes in our built environ- ment over barely half a life-span have had at least as marked effects. Before suburban box-land, urban filing cabinets and grab-for- yourself shopping, people lived differently: there were different unspoken values in society. It is not that everything is worse today — far from it — but one thing cer- tainly is. Architecture is more finely geared to profitability then ever before. If it isn’t, why are the pro- fessional journals full of these values? Even for those who choose not to work like this, architects have the power to make money for their clients. Indeed, some say that build- ings are commissioned by people who want to make money out of them and the architect’s role is to service this need. We may not all share this approach but it underlies the majority of the decisions which shape our world. There is a school of thought which holds that encouraging pro- fitability will establish a healthy economic base for run-down areas; “quality of life’ improvements fol- low in due course. Others hold that the dynamic management necessary for this does not want to live in a low-status dump. The arts, there- fore, need subsidy as part of a management recruitment package. Both approaches have proved’ suc- cessful (in their terms) but I can’t help feeling that something is the wrong way round; for the pursuit of profit has destroyed cities, coun- tryside and bio-regions. It has des- troyed individuals and divided society. BUILDING FOR TOMORROW Yet profit unpursued is but a natural consequence of commercial activities which serve a need in the community: the interchange of goods and services arising out of listening to the surrounding situa- tion. With this approach we can build a physical environment based on listening to the spirit of places and the needs of the human spirit. It won't solve all the problems, but it is a step in the right direction. To people who say you can’t afford to work in this way I can only answer that I can. With conventional economic structures, any aesthetic involve- ment in making things costs more money. Many people cannot afford more than the lovelessly utilarian (so Iam told, though my observa- tions of virtually all manufactured products is that they try to look good, usually to look better than they are). In fact, expense is much more a secondary issue than many people realize. In other parts of the world many things that we consider essential are unattainable luxuries. The crucial issue is, how long can we, as a society which hopes to remain civilized, survive if we give more value to use than beauty, to what we (privately and materially) can get out of things rather than what we (commonly and spiritu- ally) can give through them? In terms of spiritual nourishment deeper than the glossy cosmetic, much of our daily surroundings approach bankruptcy. The poor and less successful live in surroundings that are often aesthetic disasters; their values, sensitivities and depen- dence are pressured by these sur- roundings. 181PLACES OF THE SOUL Partly as reaction, but mostly in the search for inner renewal from the deep well-springs of nature, some people seek solace in (rela- tively) wild environments. Wil- derness, rough country, even more-or-less unpolluted and little- managed woodland, downland, heath and waterside are essential for the de-stressing, re-rooting and life- renewing which all too rarely can be found in most people’s daily sur- roundings. None the less we can go to attractive ‘natural’ places — parks, woodland, moorland — and yet somehow not feel nourished. These are landscapes to look at and photograph but not to breathe in; they are landscapes in which we cannot feel a living spiritual presence. We can go to others where this life is very strong. You don’t need to believe in fairies to ex- perience this (although if you ex- perience it strongly it may become hard to deny their existence!). These are places which give us strength and renewal. Why? And what is it we experience there? 182 At the most material level we can observe perhaps that the air qual- ity allows lichens to grow or that human activities (such as manage- ment by grazing animals) are in a harmonious balance with nature and the uniqueness of the place. Inevitably in such a place the ecol- ogy — be it lush or semi-arctic — is rich. It has so many biological pathways and cycles that you can- not make any one simple diagram. This gives it resilience and health. The elusive ambiguities of its multi- I challenge any reader to find an ecologically healthy place which, however undramatic, is not also beautiful — and by beautiful I mean nourishing to the spirit. In the same way places which are ecologically one-sided tend to be one-sided in what they can offer in spiritual nutrition. For too long townscape has been dominated by the accidental conse- quence of compartmentalized accommoda- tions of material needs. Can we as shapers of the built environment offer as wide and symbiotic a range of spirit nourishment as can healthy landscapes? Can we at least try to?track systems make the whole place seem a living being. These sort of places are food for our spirit; we can meaningfully use the word ‘beauty’, even where pho- tographically they may be a bit uneventful. Aesthetics — a spiritual description — and ecological stabil- ity — a material one — are insepar- able. I sometimes have the experience that the weather is an outer picture of how I feel inside. At first sight this is a ridiculous idea and just goes to prove that I, and others who have this experience, are psychologically unhinged! But it is true that living weather has within it many moods; a wind can be both fierce and cleansing, sunlight both relaxing and life-stirring at the same moment; the clouds are never fixed; the weather is always in a living state of change. Somewhere within these many, simultaneous, elusively indefinable moods are the moods that we need: moods that are outer pictures of our inner soul life, moods that give the balance that we need. In nature, even developed or disturbed by man (as it is everywhere in the world) we can find these moods. We can also try to provide as wide a choice of mood in the man-made environ- ments we build. It is after all in these that 90 per cent of us spend 90 per cent of our time. Before even we can start to think about places to nourish the soul we have to be emphatic that places are for people. This may sound obvi- ous, but the fact is that most places are, to a large extent, the accidental result of collections of buildings, each conceived as a separate object. BUILDING FOR TOMORROW Even the spaces within these build- ings are often designed to provide for people as quantitative statistics to be packaged efficiently and love- lessly. I was taught that planning starts with a ‘bubble diagram of relation- ships between different spaces; with no quality attached to the linking lines which so desperately need to in adverbs. Diagramatically, a lift is a perfect way to convey people, to link bubbles on the diagram. But if we think of the pleasure, sociabil- ity, experience progression and preparatory thresholds of the jour- ney, we might choose a sloping, winding passageway opening to many views, passing and coloured by many events. Reading the dia- gram as adverbs rather than mere relationships between nouns would, therefore, lead to entirely different planning. Starting by organizing diagrams while leaving qualities to be added subsequently is like painting by colouring-in drawings. Paintings live in colour — colour which is concentrated, enhanced and modi- fied in its effects by shape and boundary. Likewise énvironments live in sensory quality — the effects of which are organized to concen- trate particular moods. Diagrams play an important part in organiz- ing the architect’s thoughts, but they are only a starting point, the point of understanding what, aris- ing out of the most practical re- quirements, are the important mood themes and how they can be brought together in terms of spa- tial relationship. From then on these moods and their relationships lead the design until what was once aPLACES OF THE SOUL Bright place to stop and remove boots (tile floor) 184 Entry arch to building and dark, low, turning ‘portal passage’ (tile floor) If sequential experiences are seen not merely as the consequences of a diagram, but as meaningful adverbs, they may well become the organizing features of a design. Here in the entry to a kindergarten it is important that small children leave the restrictive stress and abstract visual-only experiences of their car journeys to school behind them.‘Turn of direction to a spacious room, now at tree~ top level and with a wooden floor which sounds quite different from the previous brick or tile ‘flooring diagram has disappeared and been reborn in terms of experience sequences. I was also taught that architects solve problems; design proposals were referred to as ‘solutions’. Peo- ple can be offended if you refer to their home as a problem, or a solu- tion — to them it is a living being, rich in multiple functions both spiritual and practical, mostly in- separable. The simplistic categorical nature of diagram thinking and problem solving tends to push the qualita- tive aspects into second place at least. It leads to ‘covered way’, ‘cor- tidor’ and ‘route’ instead of cloister, passageway and alley. Diagram thinking can extend into adjectival descriptions like ‘secluded study corner’, but unless these key words ‘secluded’, ‘study’ and ‘corner’ can be brought alive there is a risk that the building will not rise above the level of a built diagram. I have been in many buildings where I know exactly how the architect intended me to act. BUILDING FOR TOMORROW The diagram is not something to build. It stands for something ticher, just as the written script for an actor is only the stepping-stone to that moment when suddenly great spiritual truths flow through his whole being, transforming his words from repetition to something to touch every heart that hears. Many of those buildings that form our world, however, do not even rise above their allegiances to dead material — ease of industrial manufacture, material durability or monetary savings at the expense of life-supporting construction and design. Their qualitative charac- teristics are life-suppressing and their physical, biological and spiri- tual effect on places and on people are damaging. These sort of buildings have set a trend in simplifying architecture down to that which is photograph- able. As such they appeal to other photographic-conscious architects, establishing an incestuous cycle which still has an enormous in- fluence on the profession. It is at the price of all those other qualities that both arise from, and nurture, the realm of life. Ihave discussed forms and qual- ities that are full of life. Yet these can be used in many ways. When science-fiction illustrators picture the future it is in an architecture of curvilinear towers and pinnacles, interwoven with fluid-formed trackways, often in shimmering materials. These astro-cities are set within harsh dead deserts, depend- ing totally upon mechanical life- support. They themselves have no meaningful root in place, time or living processes; instead the forms 185PLACES OF THE SOUL Photography can focus on architecture or its occupants. In fact, our attention is normally on the latter but architecture is setting the background mood. For everyone except architects the issue is not how noteworthy the architecture is, but what mood it sets. of their architecture imitate the forms of living things. They are cities built on illusion and fantasy. Such environments are not so far away. In advertising, children’s toys, entertainment, restaurant and shop interiors and even in building forms, some of these powerful, deceptive, outer-image forms are already around us. This fantasy has great appeal for it is the complete opposite of the world of faceless, organized, dead, mineral objects that can be found in every city all over the world. Typi- cally, buildings for bureaucracies are anonymous, gridded boxes; bank headquarters rectangular, patterned towers lifelessly dominating the streetscape at their feet. These sort of buildings — the fantastic and the rigid — are pic- 186 tures, with powerful soul effect, of inhuman polarities within society. ‘One pole feeds all that is materialis- Uc and so rationally organized that the ambiguous, unpredictable and spontaneous is suppressed. At the other extreme lies personal, emo- tional and physical indulgence, the cultivation of desires in place of responsibilities. A lot of money is made catering for and reinforcing this tendency. The lifeless realm, on the other hand, controls a lot of money and with it a lot of people’s lives. These forces are very much in evidence around us. To observe them we need only to step back from what we take for granted. They are forces which seek to diminish individual moral respon- sibility and inner freedom — in other words, that which stands at the core of the human being, dis- tinguishing humans from animals. Some would call these forces dia- bolical and point to their manifesta- tion in the arms race or narcoticstrade — other people do those sorts of things. But whenever architec- ture seeks to influence people for gain or gives its allegiance to things rather than people or spirit of place, it is servant to these same masters. Not just to counter these forces but also to bring something health- giving to the natural and human environment we need to bring together the organizing and the life- filled, the rational and the feeling, the straight and the curved, the sub- stantial and the transitory, matter and light, in a different way. We need to build buildings and places of life-renewing, soul-nurturing, spirit-strengthening qualities. Soul can only be given by souls — not by computer systems or industrial might. These have their place as aids to fulfilling our intentions; too often however they have a shaping in- fluence upon these intentions, leav- ing no room for living processes of design, construction, use and matu- ration. It is living processes that bring things to life. This may sound like impractical nonsense, the opposite of the way things are normally done but I am convinced it is the only sensible way. Some people say that the approach set out in this book, and upon which my own architectural work is founded, stands the conventional world on its head, others that it is just ordinary common sense. I hope itis the latter — though ifit is why don’t we see more evidence of this common sense in our surround- ings? All that I am trying to do is to stand back and recognize the essence of the situation, the essence of what is happening. The course of every human life BUILDING FOR TOMORROW is uniquely individual, yet together we share certain biographical pat- terns. We develop not only physi- cally but in early life towards becoming self-directed individuals and thereafter in our individual development. Outwardly we meet both stress and stimulation, obsta- cle and opportunity from environ- ment and society. Inwardly we travel a path of transformation of lower egocentric and bodily-bound forces into higher forms which are more gift orientated, more spiritual. People make this journey with widely varying motivation, persis- tence, speed and success. The earth itself is also on a jour- ney of transformation. Man’s deeds make more or less room for the health-giving forces of nature and cosmos to work. There are many, many transformations for the worse but also many for the better, potent even if less conspicuous. That is the situation. This is the context in which our architectural deeds must be placed. Will they aid the fragile upward growth process or the powerful downward one? Yet even after making conscious decisions to work for growth and freedom in place of ossification and enslavement (for love rather than for power) we need to know how to act. Any action can be raised into an artistic deed, any experience to an artistic experience — and _ this underlies the dilemma in contem- porary fine art. When does the work of art require observers to change their inner state so as to be able to experience what others con- sider to be banal as art? Or when is the experience of what is perhaps 187PLACES OF THE SOUL outwardly common place none the less so moving that it has the effect of an artistic experience without demanding to be called art? The former category predomin- ates in the commercial galleries — like the emperor’s clothes they are after all well suited to status pur- chasers. The latter brings a raising, civilizing, enabling, healing in- fluence into society. It is easy just to state our inten- tions and then prove that we have achieved them. I am not immune from this, which is why I ask you to consider the contents of this book dispassionately, neither sup- porting nor objecting to what is potentially emotive material. Only by observing things in this way, without the fog of personal reac- tion, attempting to penetrate to the true essence of their being, can we hope to come to any objectively meaningful assessment. We need to look at the architectural vocabulary — inits widest sense — in this way. When we really observe what, for example, a hard smooth surface, mid-morning sunlight, acoustic absorbent materials and so on really do, we can get a sense of what they really do to living spirits — to places, to people, to ourselves. Just as our inner development steers and is steered by our biogra- phy, we shape and are shaped by our environment. This cyclical pro- cess is so indissolubly bound that we cannot step outside it to shape or be shaped differently without conscious action. It is this step that this book is concerned with. The issues are universal, but any applications involve, of course, individual situations and individual 188 interpreters. I have given examples of how I go about doing things, examples which I hope make clear that there are no serious difficulties in working in this sort of way. Most categorically, however, I wish to avoid presenting a series of answers. There are no answers except those for which the seeds lie in every question; and every question is unique as it arises afresh in every new situation. Rather, my hope is to colour the whole way of going about things. It is like learning to speak, something to develop, cul- tivate, sharpen — but when you use it, to forget. This colour is, I hope, something to become part of our beings. For all of us it is not some- thing fixed and final but something growing. What I write is not novel; I write the obvious. It is my belief that we ‘all already know it — and the test of my ability to transcend the limi- tations of my personal viewpoint is whether you recognize truth in what I describe or regard it as a lot of nonsense. We all know it, but somewhere the significance of what we know has slipped through the cracks in the floor. When I think for a moment of this significance, I am horrified by how little account is taken of it. I am horrified by the disastrous effects of the world we are building today. My plea is that the obvious is taken seriously. If it isn’t, we will be known as the generation of des- troyers — destroyers of places, of ecological stability and of the human in human beings. If it is, we can start to build an architecture of heal- ing, to build places of the soul. This book is only about the start.