The addition of shops and offices adds a degree of excitement to otherwise inert, dormitory areas. Contact, even of the most casual kind, with commercial enterprises gives us a transfusion of an energy we are not always capable of producing ourselves. Waking up isolated and confused at three in the morning, we can look out of the window and draw solace from the blinking neon signs in a storefront across the road, advertising bottled beer or twenty-four-hour pizza and, in their peculiar way, evoking a comforting human presence through the paranoid early hours.
All of this, Le Corbusier forgot – as architects often will.
6.
Then again, omissions are to be expected given the difficulties of understanding our needs and converting this knowledge into the unambiguous language of the architectural plan. It is easy enough to recognise when a room is properly lit and a staircase easy to navigate, but so much harder to convert this intuitive sense of well-being into a logical understanding of the reasons for it. To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap.
No wonder so many buildings provide sad testimony to the arduousness of self-knowledge. No wonder there are so many rooms and cities where architects have failed to convert an unconscious grasp of their own needs into reliable instructions for satisfying the needs of others.
Our behaviour is riddled with eccentricities which frustrate casual attempts at prediction. Rather than sitting in the middle of a room on a soft armchair, we are capable of deciding that we feel more comfortable perched on a hard bench set against the walls. We may ignore the path built for us by a landscape architect in order to trace out our own shortcut – just as our children may find it more amusing to play around a car-park ventilation shaft than on a purpose-built playground.
Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments. It isn’t sufficient that our chairs comfortably support us; they should in addition afford us a sense that our backs are covered, as though we were at some level still warding off ancestral fears of attacks by a predator. When we approach front doors, we appreciate those that have a small threshold in front of them, a piece of railing, a canopy or a simple line of flowers or stones – features that help us to mark the transition between public and private space and appease the anxiety of entering or leaving a house.
We don’t generally experience chronic pain when the fine-grained features of design have been ignored; we are simply forced to work harder to overcome confusion and eddies of unease. Yet if someone were to ask us what was the matter, we might not know how to elaborate on the malign features of our environment. We might resort to mystical language, citing unlucky harmonies between the sofa and the carpet, inauspicious magnetisms emanating from the door or contrary energies flowing out of the window – such terms compensating for the difficulties we otherwise have in explaining our irritations. Although nothing in our feeling about places can honestly be said to defy reason, it is not hard to see why we might look to a religious superstructure to lend substance to our elusive discomforts.
However, these can in the end always be traced back to nothing more occult than a failure of empathy, to architects who forgot to pay homage to the quirks of the human mind, who allowed themselves to be seduced by a simplistic vision of who we might be, rather than attending to the labyrinthine reality of who we are.
7.
The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendency which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
In architecture, as in so much else, we cast around for explanations to our troubles and fix on platitudinous targets. We get angry when we should realise we are sad and tear down ancient streets when we ought instead to introduce proper sanitation and street lights. We learn the wrong lessons from our griefs while grasping in vain for the origins of contentment.
The places we call beautiful are, by contrast, the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.
VI. The Promise of a Field
1.
A field somewhere outside a town. For a few million years, it slept under a blanket of ice. Then a group of people with pronounced lower jaws settled on it, lit their fires and, on a stone plinth, sacrificed an occasional animal to strange gods. Millennia went by. The plough was invented, and wheat and barley were sown. The monks owned the field, then the king, then a merchant, and in the end a farmer, who received a generous sum from the government in return for surrendering it to the colourful progress of meadow buttercups, ox-eye daisies and red clover.
The field has had an eventful life. A German bomber far off its target flew over it in the war. Children interrupted long car journeys to be sick on the edge of it. People lay down in it in the evenings and wondered whether the lights overhead were stars or satellites. Ornithologists tramped through it in oatmeal-coloured socks and spotted families of Black Redstarts. Two Norwegian couples on a bicycling tour of the British Isles camped here for a night and, in their tents, sang ‘Anne Knutsdotter’ and ‘Mellom Bakkar og Berg’. Foxes looked around. Mice made exploratory journeys. Worms kept their heads down.
But time has run out for the field. The patch of dandelions will soon be the living room of number 24. A few metres away, among the corn poppies, will be the garage for number 25, and there, in the white campions, its dining room, where a person not yet born will one day have an argument with his or her parents. Above the hedgerow, there’ll be a child’s room, drawn up by a woman working on a computer in an air-conditioned office in a business park near a motorway. A man in an airport on the other side of the world will miss his family and think of home, its foundations dug where a puddle now lies. Great Corsby Village will do its best to imply its age and inevitability, and nothing more will be said of the redstarts, picnics or the long summer’s evening that rang to the sound of ‘Mellom Bakkar og Berg’.
2.
The building of new houses is typically synonymous with desecration, with the birth of neighbourhoods less beautiful than the countryside they have replaced.
However bitter this equation, we conventionally accept it with passivity and resignation. Our acquiescence stems from the authority that buildings can acquire through the simple fact of their existence. Their mass and solidity, the lack of clues as to their origins, the difficulty and cost involved in removing them, lends them the unchallengeable conviction of an ugly cliff-face or hill.