 |
| Bridge of Sighs, Oxford |
From infancy to maturity we work out our identities, how we think and feel, in distinctive places. Our sensate experience of place opens up our intellectual grasp of it. In the built environment architecture can mediate political, religious or ethical visions, help shape our personalities and influence how we relate to and perceive one another. Built space can oppress, dehumanise and stifle creativity or offer a sense of order and belonging - from the richly encoded forms and symbols of the medieval cathedral to the dwarfing forms and colourless nondescript streets of communist planning that seem to shout ‘submit!’. More than simply providing shelter and security for home, work and play structure and form can alter our mood, stimulate our feelings, prompt memories and trigger our thoughts. Yet much of this is ‘transparent’ to us, as Architectural critic Colin Wilson notes, leading to ‘a condition that we do not see, but see through’.
In a most basic sense we all ‘inhabit a map’. Our ‘mental world is in part a set of routes between familiar points’. This Rowan Williams captures through the aboriginal idea of ‘song lines’ - that the whole world is shaped by songs to be sung with the diverse features of geography forming the cues. Aborigines could hence navigate across huge distances by ‘singing’ unique lines of song. Indeed, the orators of ancient Greece and Rome would picture their familiar built environment in remembering highly complex and nuanced information having associated data with architectural elements. All this acutely points towards an intimacy of persons and place.
What surrounds us can have a potent effect on common life together.
Even in our homes we find ourselves drawn to arranging elements in a certain way - selecting colours, furnishings of one sort and not another- we mount photographs and paintings and mementos because a part of us implicitly sees the character and identity of where we are as deeply important. We like to create space that we feel we belong in. If this is vital in the private, what about the public built world?
The meaning of buildings can be mute - malls, airports, pedestrian zones or even civic sites seeming like ‘no place in particular’. We can feel as though we are anonymous consumers adrift. Knabb can speak of the ‘constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones". Even the style and geometry of our streets can mimic a collection of individuals unconcerned with one another.
Does our architecture carry pointers to and memories of shared history and values? Does it chronicle our mutual investment, cooperation and creativity? Does it ground and orient us, summoning us to responsibility and togetherness? As we wander through our villages, towns, and cities can we pick up on a celebration of common life in form, symbol, craft and local resource? This is our challenge.
