EXCLUSIVE COLUMN
Kevin
McCloud Get the language right and there’s no room to misinterpret the meaning of fine buildings, says our editor-at-large
T
here’s a rule of thumb in the military that when you issue an order you ask the recipient to repeat it back. This way you can check whether they were listening and whether they understood what you were saying. It can all go wrong. That’s the basis of so much human tragedy, and so much comedy too. In one of the Pink Panther films Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau asks a man, ‘Do you know the way to the Palace hotel?’ ‘Yes,’ the man replies, and walks off. Clouseau specialises in misinterpretation. He is French, and pretty well everyone else isn’t. Even the other French characters speak clearer English. My favourite moment is when a villain speeds off in a car down the street and Clouseau runs up to a taxi. About to get in, he shouts through the window, ‘Follow that car!’ The taxi driver gets out and runs off in pursuit, leaving Clouseau on the pavement. Verbal misinterpretation can happen in many places: in your brain, between your brain and mouth, between the listener’s ears and their brain and, weirdly, in the ether between you. It happens for many reasons: predispositions, wilfulness, emotional or information overload and stupidity. It also happens because of the conceptual limitations of language and changes in the usage of words over time. Today, ‘sublime’ means ‘very beautiful’. Its chemistry-related definition, derived from the process of sublimation, is irrelevant to most of us. As for its
19th-century romantic definition of an effect of inspiration mixed with awe or terror, forget that. Even awesome has a different meaning now too. The 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was suspicious of words, writing, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ What he should have written is, ‘I should get out more. Maybe visit an art gallery to look at some sublime 19th-century Caspar David Friedrich paintings, feed the ducks by the pond and catch an awesome movie.’ He should have examined non-verbal communication a little more, swapped a picture for a thousand words and explored a few more sensations. But who am I to tell him what to do? If I had he’d clearly have misinterpreted me. Pictures and drawings are the first communication tools of architects and designers. We add fly-through videos and computer graphic images to the toolbox when it comes to selling a design idea to a client or a planning committee. But the basic processes of exploring ideas and developing a mature design involve drawing and modelling. An architect friend of
Even with pictures and fly-through videos there is enough potential for error
mine is so worried about the accuracy of his drawings in conveying an idea he always starts his first client meeting with a blunt soft pencil so his sketches stay a bit ambiguous. He prefers his pictures, at least at the beginning, to convey maybe just 50 words and one loose idea. As an aside, making television programmes is more journalistic. The words must be honed down to convey a sequence of ideas, a story, and luckily enough there are moving pictures to go with that story. Because it is primarily a visual medium, everyone remembers the building and the people. No one remembers their names or the words. The same goes for this column. I’ll be lucky if 10 per cent of Grand Designs magazine readers have got to this point in the text. If you have, congratulations and thank you. Most of us, me included, just look at the pictures and then maybe read the captions if we’re really interested. But even with pictures and flythrough videos there is enough potential for error and deceit to fill a Pink Panther movie. The truth is that architecture is a discipline of translation, where ideas are made manifest in tangible finished objects. Where the differing hopes,
MAGAZINE.COM / SEPTEMBER 2021 19
