Architecture of my world
" To distinguish everyday building from the more ambitious aspirations of what we call architecture" Bill Hillier.
As my pen begins to shape these words…and as the pure blue sky blooms away majestically…and as the birds silence themselves…I wonder. Is this the world I chose to place myself within? Though I stand where everyone stands I find myself gliding into a world of mystery and obscurity. Are these merely traces of my thoughts? Or is it just a dream? I thought about the sky as I saw its blue color, I thought about the grass as I soared along its green colors. I thought about the cookie I left by the blunt window niched in the old house lying across the street. I thought…
Our thoughts are momentarily distractions from the real physical world we live in, and what happens during those momentarily distractions are hardly ever bared in mind. There are only a few things which stop the flow of our thoughts as we walk through the streets of our hometown…and one those things is a great architectural piece, standing silently. Only how many times do we stop to take notice of it? Its colored bricks are pleading for a pair of eyes to fall upon them…to feel their presence, and alas take a closer look…or maybe even a touch. As we open an old Victorian door our thoughts take us back to the 19th century, & if we listen hard enough we hear the sounds of carriages coming to a stop nearby…and if we smell hard enough we can feel the presence of a factory burning coal nearby. Thus we are in a new world. A world created by the architectural features lying across the street; too close for us to notice but too far away for us to ignore.
Something architecture can offer us which can't be achieved otherwise is the ability to take us into different eras, every time creating a new experience allowing us to picture the world differently.
Have we thought of what effect our buildings could do when we placed a white blunt cube behind a rusted, silent brick house? Its effect was almost as brutal as the constant removal of trees by the mere justification of creating a piece of furniture or a frame of a door. Have we then thought it justifiable?
Whether the architect was successful in creating the life we yearned for is still a mystery, but as we find ourselves distancing away from that world we can only but assume that we haven’t yet been able to. And though we feel it sometimes…when we visit a place so different from what we have been accustomed to, we can’t when it is a place our eyes have taken for granted. We yearn for a world which can awaken our deathly souls, we yearn for a world which can relate us to our forgotten selves, which can create bounds not break them. This unfortunately is too far for us to dream of; as we watch the characters of life force us into a drama and an arduous life sucking every hint of light.
