Transitional & Contemplative Architecture

By Loke Hau Yee

ABSTRACT

Transitional architecture considers as potential elements within a building and consider as the recipe for maintain the dynamic of the building. If successfully rises, where the users‟ senses come alive with anticipation, the transition senses for the circulatory spaces will lead the users travel through the spaces within a building lively. Desolately, transitional architecture always a part that easily to abandon or being ignored by the architects or designer, the creators do not aware the transitional space can actually implant psychological effect on the human brain. There is a visibly potential and attention which need to pay to the circulatory spaces within, realising that the movement around the building takes on a special and spiritual dimension. Along with the transitional path, contemplative practice is able to be engendered. By exploring contemplative practices and spirituality, the transitional spaces will embody in societal values and aspirations and connecting the architecture to the occupants in deeper ways. The discussion focusing on discovers the thoughtful articulation and celebration of the transitional architecture, also called as „unassignable‟ or non –programmed spaces within a building, a space that need for the circulation in the inclusive environment.

Keywords –

Transitional Architecture,Contemplative Architecture, Human Psychology, User‟s Experience, Movement, Spatial Design.

1.0 Introduction

Wherever there is mere building, there is architecture. It is the architects‟ job to create a line, bonding building with „real‟ architecture which also name as the action for upgrading the level of the quality of the experience. Great architecture, regardless of its typology, can always be humbly designed and planned on its spatial design. In some case, a simple architecture form or element providing the richest experience through careful and considered design. On the other hand, we have many highly visible buildings built around, but it is a fail marvel that most of their design lost the opportunity to delight and enrich their surroundings. In logic explanation, those buildings are merely „construction‟ which serving a utilitarian purpose, fulfilling in terms of functional and usage, however without a single concern on the style, ratio or senses responding. Stated by Philip Johnson, “all architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space”. It is not the purpose of a certain building, but the quality of it where it can reach a standard deserves to call as „architecture‟. Function is not the only requirement of the spatial design, but the users‟ psychological respond are related intimately to the architecture.

In a human body, the circulation refers to blood that carries life-giving oxygen. While in term of architectural, we can relate the circulation spaces in the similar way they are critical. Figure 1.0: Transitional architecture.

Well-designed transitional spaces in the building provide rich experience along the journey, and achieving contemplative practice with the enhancement of psychonautic elements. The important of contemplative practices reflected, which the occupants have rooms to breathe – to digest what they had just experienced and to ready for what is to come. To be clearer, transitional spaces are the gaps which preventing occupants from having sudden shock but implementing contemplative practice. If a design is all about „surprise, surprise, surprise‟, the spatial will lose influence possibility as it do not allowing occupants to process what those „surprises‟ mean to them. They do not receiving the message of the space, and by the end, they do not „heard‟ the architecture that „speak‟ to them

Figure 2.0: Contemplative architecture.

Background Study

“Architecture can‟t force people to connect, it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers, and make meeting places useful and attractive.”

- Denise Scott Brown

 The important of transitional architecture in

inclusive environment

In 1994, Kisho Kurokawa, one of the leading members of the Metabolist movement in 1960s and 70s, emphasized the need to provide intermediating elements and spaces in our spaces. According to his explanation, the transitional spaces, also serves as the intermediating elements and spaces, they do not always perform in a physical form. It is some kind of relationship and communication that connecting people together and does not necessary to have walls to define it.

Some researchers narrowed on studying certain characteristics of transitional architecture as an alignment, which simply can explain by a physical connection, such as atriums, plazas, urban corridors, gathering spaces, courtyard and similar. For the non-physical explanation, transitional architecture can be define by having their function on