How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture

Product Information

With your observational toolkit tuned up, take your sensibilities on the road. You should be able to conduct the same kinds of procedures in any architectural space or, for that matter, as you behold any building’s exterior. What is your thinking like when you’re standing on the steps of a courthouse, gazing up at the details carved into its stone facade? How does your heart behave in an art gallery? What’s your mood like in an unfamiliar restaurant? As with your learner exercises in the home, try to tune in to the elements that speak to you. What are they saying? With time and practice, this kind of assessment of a built space can start to become automatic. Those responses have always been there. You are now just training yourself to be attuned to them. How old is the building? Architecture is, of course, not static. Tastes change and so does the world. Transportation networks, the economy and lifestyles all evolve and, as they do so, architectural fashions adapt. It’s very common, for example, for two adjacent buildings to have been constructed in different eras and to embody different architectural styles. In the best cases, the later buildings will still relate stylistically to the earlier ones in some way. Exploring the temporal relationships between a building and its surroundings can provide fascinating insight. The award-winning journalist Emily Anthes’s book The Great Indoors (2020) focuses on the impact that interior environments have on our lives. The book is replete with fascinating examples and important applications of the science of interior design. 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.

D' Angelo, M., 2022. Neri Oxman Takes Her Interdisciplinary MoMA Exhibition Online. [online] Architect. Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022]. Architects must learn to attune themselves to the way that a design influences their feelings. This can be a little bit like mindfulness meditation and can be practised with very simple objects – even something like a chair or a vase – before working up to things such as cathedrals or other architectural showpieces. Though a trainee architect takes years to learn how to do this, some practice with the basics will enrich your experience of architecture. You can also ask yourself: besides the actions of other inhabitants, what features of the spaces of your home contribute to your thoughts and feelings? Consider shape (including the shape of a particular room), patterns, colour, and form. For example, higher ceilings may promote abstract thinking, and people tend to find curvature attractive. You might even think about how you could change design elements within your home to shape it to your needs and desires. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-29 15:00:44 Boxid IA40195308 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierUnderstanding 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). 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. 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.

The observation that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’, attributed to Winston Churchill, may be threadbare but it is nevertheless profoundly true. The buildings we inhabit help to make us who we are. Yet, in the run of our everyday experiences, it’s easy to become desensitised to their influences. Buildings can seem at times like little more than the containers of human experience, but they are so much more than that. Architecture can function as a vessel of emotion and thought. It can influence the way you feel about yourself and others. As any great art can change who you are, so can a building. It is the art that you live, work and play inside. If you are willing to spend the time to curiously explore buildings both from the inside and the outside, you will be rewarded with a greater sense of the power of place and, with mastery, a more refined ability to use your settings to control your own experience.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.