As buildings are most often experienced as oblique glimpses, Eleanor Young asks whether it’s possible to design in fragments, considering the brief moment even before the big picture
How does your building first manifest? Not to you as an idea, a sketch or a drawing but to the person in the street.
There is a chance that will be as the classic architectural photograph of the primary facade – as, for example, one looks from Newcastle over to the Sage Gateshead or at the MI6 building across the River Thames. But this is rare.
Most buildings are experienced in glimpses and fragments, the corner turned alongside the lamppost and parking sign, the projecting suburban bay, the door canopy with the quite unrelated grocer’s sandwich board beyond. Even better when there is a slow reveal of a church apparently rising over the hill or the archway opening up into a cool mews and lit windows or – I am suddenly transported there – the busy streets of the London School of Economics with the warm shards of the angles of O’Donnell + Tuomey’s student building. This, by the way, is absolutely the sanest way to experience an object or building of scale – just as in Venice the cruise ships are only bearable if seen gliding at the end of a vista framed by tight streets.
We are used to visualisations for planning showing the building demurely in context. The visual narrative being a demonstration that this new building will not be as high/bright/imposing as you might think. In fact, look! It disappears behind the new trees and planters. For efficiency these are the drawings that have to be drawn. There is little time in practice to play around with the compositions of collages that a building might throw up for the casual passer-by or the worker hurrying in late from the car park.
The architectural moments we notice, love and feel we own are often just fragments – a colour, the wind and the movement captured in a reflection
But we could learn from the juxtapositions that abound on Instagram and in our own photo libraries. The architectural moments that we notice, love – and feel we own – are often just such fragments, a colour here that picks up a colour there, a rustle in the wind and the movement captured in a reflection in a few seconds of live photo. We capture them ourselves on our phones.
If this understanding of layering was applied to design would it be possible to design moments? To curate fragments? Does that work with orthogonal design with plans and sections? How could it ever be represented? And built? Perhaps there are architects out there already doing it...