What does a building say about the person, or people, who built it? This question varies from case to case, as the influence of the architect’s own voice is modulated based on societal values and the degree to which these values penetrate the building process. A building is a mosaic of values, hopes, visions, and realities. It can be the epitome of practicality or pure artistic expression. A government facility could be purely practical, while a sculpture could be purely aesthetic. A home exists within this range of extremes. Architecture is the projection of the human imagination onto the world of limitations, of physical laws and, as such, is a continuous struggle.
What is the house? Is it the walls or is it the volume? This is sort of like asking what makes up a fence, if it’s the wood or the air that divides the wood. Of course, it’s the volume within that permits habitation, so maybe it’s the volume. “But what volume without walls?” Okay, so the walls define the house. “But a solid block of concrete also has walls. So it must be the space within.” To the outside observer, a house would be no different from a solid block were it not for windows, or for an entrance for that matter! Can a house have no entrance? If an architect designs and builds a house with no means of entering it is a coffin, forever sealed from the external world, unless pried open.
Some buildings speak of their creators. Some do not. Though I find it strange that anyone who works on anything for so long does not, intentionally or unintentionally, leave some mark of their contribution. Consider Raphael’s sneaky appearance in The School of Athens.
Or the sketches of daydreaming monks on illuminated manuscripts:
These innocent examples bring out more than mere existence, which the painting or the manuscript alone would have proved. It brings out the individual’s thinking and imagination.
In architecture, we see people creating form in the three dimensions of space. But the end to which they create these spaces, broken off in some way from the external world, remains entirely fluid. Some houses are built to withstand heavy bombardment from artillery shells while others are meant to provide comfort in the countryside. Some are meant to confine and others to free. Regardless, architecture has proven to be one of the most lasting forms of art and functionality. They continue to shelter as they have always done, if not the body then the human spirit. For even if we vanish from the sand and soil of this Earth, the human spirit lingers among the cracked walls and ghostly forms that were formed by hands, a shadow in the valley of time.
