Hostage of the Experience of Legacy
This is the first in a series of writings on experience. I will draw on my academic and professional experience as an architect/designer and attempt to pair that with some of the external resources, influential figures, and challenges that I have run into along the way. I’m trying to figure out what makes a design practice at this particular moment in time.
But at the moment I’m trying to figure out whether I really have control over an experience at all.
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An Architect Might Tell You
Yeah… my job is about creating the environment in which people live and work, one building at a time. Live and work. I’m not sure what else. If I make the buildings, who else might have better hands on the experience. Well… maybe with the exception of the roads and bridges, perhaps the landscape as well, but I am sure to get my say in those moments too. When my colleagues and I are doing our jobs correctly the outcome is an environment . If I can speak to any design avenue well enough with others I can truly reach for all that I can carry and then some, and I take that knowledge with me.
“Even a brick wants to be something.” — Louis Kahn
“As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown.” — Norman Foster
“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
“Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.” I.M. Pei
I Would Also Insist
I am defining experience as a tone that is composed of an influential primary structure and its offshoots that deliver the details of the influence. There is a beginning and an end to an experience, and ideally, experiences will be introduced and facilitated by this tone. Its influence can be somewhat amorphous when you don’t fully know what it’s about, but there is always some sort of order that is created by an author or a system in cycle or one trying to reach an equilibrium. Each experience exists in a network of similar and different experiences that have influence on one another to the extent that to the observer, one experience might blend into another.
To describe it imaginatively, experience, a tone, can be seen as having the form of a feather. A quill or spine that sets the direction of hundreds of spline like barbs that not only strike out in their own space but in aggregate define a meaningful shape while still framing unique negative form between each. I guess an even better way to imagine it would be a three dimensional feather as most feathers, as their function commands, only really take advantage of two dimensions. This must make the feather a perfect cross- sectional diagram of an experience for which all of the previous thoughts still hold.
Experiences can be created but never fully controlled, and their reach is subject the intensity and context of the other experiences that exist and move around them. While this arrangement is messy it means that the creation of an experience is less about creation from scratch and more about creation from arranging and rearranging portions of existing experiences to mean something novel at a specific place and time. Creators, designers, or architects of experience are trying to make a functioning wing, a collection of existing or new feathers that work in concert, to achieve an outcome.
For this architect the consequence that comes with the rearrangement of the largest experiences is the weight of the context that we live in. Each community’s unspoken rules, laws, and societal expectations, mostly for good reason, create an evolving framework in which experiences must perform and negotiate the responsibility of a creator to the community and the liability in what happens to those who observe or traverse their creations. At this level, with so many mouths to feed and limited power over the basic building materials, existing experiences to be manipulated, the architect becomes more of a translator than a chef. In the real world, they are providing a service and not independently painting the spaces we live in. A service that probably promises too much in the face of the legacy of the building blocks the architect is manipulating and assumes too much responsibility failing to win all of battles this creative process initiates. The kicker is that this might be a self inflicted wound. At this point no one is asking the architect to carry the legacy of their title’s meaning but architects themselves.
Maybe this example has parallels.
