Near / Far
Infinite landscapes and the exercise of endless observation
For the past six weeks, my husband and I have been living in a van, traveling through Texas, Arizona, and Colorado. It has been quite a roller coaster, as we’ve been navigating living in the tiniest of spaces and attempting to balance part-time work with endless nature explorations. As part of this trip, we have found ourselves hiking, biking, and camping in some of the most incredible desert landscapes I’ve ever experienced. At the same time, I finally got around to reading a book that was on my “must read” list for a while — Juhani Pallasmaa’s, The Eyes of the Skin. As I read this book and absorbed my surroundings, I kept returning to the same thought — the importance and value of infinite looking.
This train of thought first began somewhere in the desert of West Texas. I spent a long time staring out into these infinite landscapes, and then staring at the ground under my feet. Something about the scale between these two — the distant and the near — as infinite continuums of one another overwhelmed me. Looking at the ground was a process of endless discovery — the more time you spent looking, the more you saw. Every rock texture, cactus shadow, flower petal was a small moment of infinite, totally absorbing detail. Looking back out at the distant view was a mind-bending experience of painting that level of detail on each visible surface. The sheer scale was unbelievable, humbling, awe-inspiring. I could stay in one place, in one small area, for hours on end and not come close to noticing everything there was to notice.
This concept of infinite looking captivated me and I began to wonder if it was possible to extend this idea into architecture. How can we make buildings that hold our attention rather than grab it? It seems to me that too often in architectural education we teach for the distant view — the bold formal move that reinforces the building as a visual object, to be appreciated and consumed with the eyes. This brings me back to Pallasmaa, who spends a lot of his introduction discussing the ways in which our culture is far too invested in the visual sense alone. He seems to share the concern that the majority of buildings of our time throw all their weight into the visual impact rather than thinking about more subtle detail-scale moves:
“The ocular bias has never been more apparent in the art of architecture than in the past half century, as a type of architecture, aimed at a striking and memorable visual image, has predominated. Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.” (p. 33)
After staring endlessly into the desert for several days, I felt that we as humans are capable of more sustained interactions with our surroundings.
The abbreviated interaction with architecture is in large part due to a limited interest in materiality. Pallasmaa touches on this, noting:
“The flatness of today’s standard construction is strengthened by a weakened sense of materiality. Natural materials — stone, brick and wood — allow our vision to penetrate their surfaces and enable us to become convinced of the veracity of matter.” (p. 34)
Over the past few years, I’ve developed a small obsession with brick as a building material. At a distance, it reads monolithically as a nearly homogeneous material. As you get closer, the monolith dissolves into many hand-sized objects, reading at the scale of the person, relatable in its relationship to the hand and to being carried and lifted into place. Whether used in a traditional structural capacity or as a modern rainscreen, brick communicates an understanding of the process behind the material, participating in our shared experience of time.
The example of brick as a building material begins to address what has been filling my brain for the past few weeks. It is important for architecture to operate at the scale of the distant view as well as the scale of the near, the intimate, the up-close. In order to create sustained engagement with buildings, conscious or otherwise, buildings should move beyond the bold formal moves to address depth and detail — a scale that lengthens and deepens our engagement with the places we find ourselves.
It is equally important to introduce these ideas to our students, teaching them to take the technical details that address the performative nature of buildings and develop them into the experiential details that define spatial comprehension at the scale of the human body and create an unfolding experience of architecture.
How then can we create buildings that address these different scales, this desire for longer looking? To me, the answer lies in materiality — developing and exploring a material sensibility that lends itself to the near and far experience of the building itself and the place in which it resides, bringing the experiential magic of the desert into our manmade surroundings.
