How To Enjoy Architecture – an introduction
How do we enjoy architecture? Architecture is useful – essential, even. It is profoundly bound up with how we live, how we organise ourselves and how these things have evolved historically. We know too that sometimes architecture aspires to the status of art. Important and vital things, but none of them necessarily about enjoyment.
My recently published book – How to Enjoy Architecture – could have been called How to Read Architecture or, perhaps, How to Understand Architecture. But neither of those titles would have captured the pleasure I get from looking at, exploring, experiencing and designing buildings. When I design, there is a profound enjoyment in the process, in the challenge and the satisfaction of resolving that challenge. But I go looking for architecture, too, loving the thrill of tracking down buildings I’ve always wanted to see. Sometimes, I stumble across it and I keep an eye out for things I find stimulating or surprising. I have learnt to look at architecture and my book is partly about trying to share what I have found.
So, what tools and skills can we use to better understand and appreciate the buildings that surround us? For most of us, architecture is experienced in a blur of habit: the rooms of our own home, a building spotted from the top of the bus that means that it’s time to get off, a familiar landmark on a routine car journey. Architecture intersects with our daily lives in ways that are immediate but also mundane, and for much of the time we push it to the back of our minds. We see it, we orient ourselves by it, but we don’t always really look at it.
Buildings brings us together, separate us, shape our days and host our nights out.
Yet this day-to-day familiarity is also one of the things that is so interesting about architecture. Buildings shape our lives in ways that are both subtle and obvious. We meet people in architecture. We are educated in it, get married in it, fall in and out of love in it, have children, grow up, go to school, work, eat, sleep and live in it. Buildings brings us together, separate us, shape our days and host our nights out.
Architecture frames our lives. We constantly move between buildings and rooms. We follow their codes of behaviour, whether it’s the quiet contemplation of an art gallery or the raucousness of a bar on a Friday night. Architecture can also be highly divisive. Buildings occasionally cause controversy, and we can have strong feelings about them. Sometimes we object to them being built when they inconvenience us or replace something we care about. We campaign to save them when they are threatened with demolition or redevelopment. We may object to them because we consider them inappropriate or feel that they represent values we don’t care for.
Sometimes it feels as if architecture is done to us, an imposition brought about by powerful, unaccountable forces. Anyone who has taken part in a public consultation on architecture knows how strong emotions are when it comes to new buildings or proposed developments. Architecture affects our environment profoundly and it mostly happens without our explicit approval.
On the other hand, buildings also engage us. We visit them at weekends for pleasure. Sometimes we even go on holiday to see them. They draw tourists and are fawned over in coffee-table books and travel guides. TV programmes, magazines and the apps on our phones are full of houses and homes and interior makeovers. Architecture is both popular and oddly enigmatic, a subject that interests us intensely but that we ignore for much of the time, too.
How To Enjoy Architecture: A Guide for Everyone, is published by Yale University Press.
Texts and ideas by Charles Holland.
Architecture is both popular and oddly enigmatic, a subject that interests us intensely but that we ignore for much of the time, too.