One measure of the success of a building is surely the enjoyment, awe and appreciation of its design. However, there is an important distinction between the performance of a building as a work of art and its role as a functioning piece of machinery in the fabric of life. A breathtaking library is a thing to admire, but if it is very difficult to find a book or even one’s own way, there is a level at which the building has failed. The designing process includes a variety of elements that are all connected and equally important individually. The way in which the building is approached, the way the light creates ambience, the scale and proportion of the building in relation to its user, and the way it is placed in its context all create a drama to be experienced. Through the use of space, enclosure, and structure, the architecture is explained. Our senses are enhanced by various thresholds and transitions designed to pause us and make us feel the surroundings. The transitions hold an element of curiosity moulded to form platforms, podiums, and spaces for people to observe the building. The narration of the building starts from an ambiguous concept transforming it into a liveable space with required functions and aesthetics. There are some features of buildings that elicit broadly shared responses from humans. For example, psychologists talk about the duality of ‘prospect and refuge’. The idea is that certain locations provide us with abundant sensory information (prospect) and make us feel safe and protected (refuge). Most people have a seemingly innate preference for locations in space that afford both good prospect and reasonable refuge. The 20th-century American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had an implicit understanding of the operation of prospect and refuge, and he used it to make residential spaces comforting by, for example, including cosy, low-ceilinged areas of refuge. The high premium on real estate with large windows and long views (ie, prospect) is also probably a consequence of these inclinations. These ideas have a long history, originating with the thoughts of early researchers of animal behaviour interested in how animals selected habitats. The overarching principle, it was argued, was to see and not be seen. urn:lcp:howtoreadbuildin0000crag:epub:a6af2ed8-1400-4c48-b98e-46ed6f24b17c Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier howtoreadbuildin0000crag Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t34291p7q Invoice 2089 Isbn 9780713686722

A great way to better appreciate the impact of your surroundings is to experiment with different locations within your home. How do things change when you go from your quiet, happy place to a more dynamic, active location? For many people, the location within the home that sees the most dynamism is the kitchen. What happens when you try the same exercise there? One approach you can use is to go through the spaces of your home systematically and compare them. You could even make an annotated map on paper, jotting down what you sense and how you feel in each room. In many other ways, though, our preferences vary. For example, I can’t stand the style of architecture known as Brutalism, a style characterised by minimal ornamentation, exposed concrete and steel, and a reverence for the raw appearance of materials. Others love the style’s honesty and integrity, and its freedom from the cloying nostalgia of older styles.

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What was the building’s approval process like? All buildings need permission and, for larger buildings, the regulatory approval process can be lengthy and complex. Except for very controversial buildings, this can take quite a lot of digging to unearth, but fruitful sources are often the archives of local news media or, if you have a lot of patience and interest, even the minutes of local government meetings. This fall, the University of Minnesota Department of English welcomed 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students into its new—and newly revitalized—home in Pillsbury Hall. A nearly two-year renovation by Architecture Advantage transformed 62,500 square feet of obsolete space into contemporary environments designed for multiple modes of learning, alternative workplace, non-laboratory research, and scholarship. Throughout the project, the Architecture Advantage design team balanced rigid adherence to standards for the historic exterior with interior planning focused on flexibility. ArchDaily. 2022. The Therme Vals / Peter Zumthor. [online] Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022]. D' Angelo, M., 2022. Neri Oxman Takes Her Interdisciplinary MoMA Exhibition Online. [online] Architect. Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022]. Buildings are embedded in cultures, histories and narratives, and a complete understanding of how a piece of architecture ‘works’ requires us to dig into those levels of meaning as well. Sometimes, one’s primal emotional response to a building and its layers of meaning can intersect. Consider a building like Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. It is a sharply angled, zig-zagging monster of discomfort and foreboding. Yet, understood as a reflection of Jewish life in Berlin after the Holocaust, the building is a brilliant response to its surroundings and their history.

Explore the functionality of a building. Look for clues that a building is fulfilling its functions well (or not), such as the amount of ease with which inhabitants seem to find their way through it. Move through a building and observe how you react. See how different parts of a building draw you in or push you away. Note any effects of transitions, such as turning a corner or descending a staircase. Design inspiration came from this stone, which was treated with great respect and dignity. Guests can enjoy the antique advantages of bathing in this space designed to help them relax and enjoy a relaxing experience. Combining light and shade, open spaces and enclosed areas, and linear elements yields an intensely sensual and restorative experience. Essentially, the interior space has an informal layout that follows a carefully modelled path of circulation, leading bathers to predetermined points while letting them explore other areas on their own. In constructing the landscape, the architect was primarily influenced by his fascination with the magical qualities of stones within the mountain, with darkness and light, with light reflections on water or in the steam saturated air, with the unique acoustics of the bubbling water, with feelings of bare skin and warm stones, and with bathing rituals. Allow yourself to move through the space as your desires call to you. Allow yourself to be pushed and pulled by your surroundings. In the mid-20th century, a political movement led by the artist-philosopher Guy Debord advocated exactly this kind of practice, which was called a dérive, or ‘drift’. The legendary Swiss French architect Le Corbusier described what he called the ‘architectural promenade’, which is a similar idea for interiors. He suggested that interiors have itineraries, which are brought to life by our movements as we traverse a space. More generally, architects are preoccupied with transitions – those locations in a building where, as we walk, a surprising vista is suddenly unveiled. Think of the effect of descending a grand staircase or turning a corner to discover an unexpectedly large vault of space, which can cause changes of posture and movement with an attendant effect on our senses, a kind of awakening. To gain a deeper appreciation for how a building relates to the world around it, it helps to dig into its history, its critics, and the stories told about (or by) its architect. Any landmark building anywhere in the world is likely to have voluminous material about it online, but even less famous places are often well documented. If you’re interested in a big, old house in your town, an online search or the local town hall will often bear fruit. Historical plaques on buildings are useful starting points and some even include links for a deeper exploration. Many cities have architectural walking tours that are offered live or via a freely available annotated map. (Here’s an example from the small city where I live.) These sources can provide a wealth of useful contextual information.Which brings us to Adler’s final category: the “syntopical” reading of a book, where we read many works of a similar type or on the same subject and compare and contrast them. That process lies at the heart of scholarship, whether we’re reading books or buildings. Our region has several buildings of Pillsbury Hall’s ilk, like Minneapolis’s City Hall, which broke ground the year of Pillsbury’s completion, and Duluth’s old Central High School, finished three years after Pillsbury. Deploying an especially forceful version of Romanesque architecture popularized by the Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson, these massive, neo-medieval piles expressed the widespread, late-19th-century belief in the power of human organization and individual effort to achieve great things—like moving mountains of stone to construct such buildings. Understanding how a building works in this more practical sense takes a little time to do well. If you have the chance to spend an hour or more in a building such as a courthouse or a library, you can take up a variety of positions, watch the buzz of activity, and get a feel for how things are working (or not).

Sarah Williams Goldhagen is one of the world’s foremost architecture critics. In her book Welcome to Your World (2017), she turns her attention to the psychology and neuroscience of design, with brilliant effect.What do you notice in the space around you? What features draw your attention? Do fine details draw you in? The contours of the space? Colours? Though some of this might seem like it has little to do with architecture, there is abundant evidence that the details of your surroundings exert a powerful influence on the patterns of your thoughts, your nervous system, and even the state of your heart and your skin. You might find yourself attending to the world in a different way while immersed in a space with lots of natural features, with less sharply focused attention. If you’re in a tightly constrained space, you might find yourself responding with anxiety and its attendant increase in heart rate and sweat gland activity. Much of what I have learned about the human response to architecture has come from my working life, in which I conduct scientific research on how people perceive and react to different kinds of environments. I’ve pioneered a method that I call ‘psychogeographic walks’, in which I lead people through a series of places while probing their thoughts, feelings and even their physiological condition, looking for associations between architecture and psychological states. The real treasure has come from post-walk debriefing sessions, when participants flesh out their impressions with me and with each other. The recommendations that follow are largely based on such practices and experiences. As you walk around a building, try to notice how moving through the space affects you. In a way, you can think of this exercise as a graduation from the first one. But now that you are moving, there are many more opportunities to notice the effects of the design of a building on your body. Do you find yourself wanting to speed up or slow down? Does your posture change as you walk through different spaces? Do you notice anything special about where you want to stop and look around? But it doesn’t take a massive cathedral to ignite interest in the human response to buildings. You might have experienced similar feelings in many different kinds of settings. Small churches, college courtyards, commercial headquarters (think of the main office of a major bank) can all evoke a response. Even everyday architectural spaces can connect with our feelings. Think of when you last walked into someone’s home for the first time and experienced an ephemeral sense of its atmosphere. Architects have written entire books about these feelings.