COMFORT ZONE

Graham McKay

ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS ARTICLE WERE TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR

We take it for granted that our buildings should keep us safe. To this end, we have regulations governing structural integrity, construction standards, and the quality of materials, in addition to mechanical performance codes under both typical and extreme conditions. Similarly, to ensure our buildings aren‘t poisonous, toxic materials, finishes, and coatings are heavily regulated, if not banned outright.

Beyond safety, buildings have often been constructed with the goal of improving health and wellbeing. For example, by the mid-1920s, we still hadn‘t developed a cure for tuberculosis (TB) but the medicinal properties of sunlight and good ventilation were known. The progressive architecture of the time aimed to promote health by providing TB patients with sufficient sunlight and natural ventilation, as well as dust-resistant surfaces or those which were easy to clean. If penicillin hadn't been discovered in 1928, our expectations of architecture might be drastically different today. Instead, its discovery made architecture as medicine a less pressing concern and in its place solariums and roof gardens became symbols of affluence and status. Le Corbusier was not stupid.

I began my blog ten years ago with the following welcome and mission statement, the goal of which was to inspire my readers to think beyond questions of style and function, and towards a more holistic view of architecture with an emphasis on wellbeing and ecology. The word shelter implies physiological needs, as do the words “... makes us feel good because it is good for us.” Optimal standards exist for space, illumination, ventilation, and thermal comfort but to suggest these elements are all that one needs in architecture is not a popular stance. My blog isn't called misfits' architecture for nothing.

"Have you ever thought Rem Koolhaas might be just another person? Or Harvard GSD not the centre of the Universe? Are you unmoved by biennali and festivali, and don't like or 'like' anything on ArchDaily? Do you sense something's very wrong with architecture? We do too. Welcome.

"Food and shelter are both essential for human life but food is anything from a bowl of rice a day to some exquisite mouthful for a moment's pleasure. Junk food is somewhere in-between but so too is just the right amount of nutrition our bodies need.

"It's the same with shelter. We've got bread buildings that fill, cake buildings that thrill, and junk buildings that make us want more. All misfits' wants is a nutritious architecture that does the shelter thing well, makes us feel good because it is good for us, doesn't cost the earth, or cost us the earth."

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https://misfitsarchitecture.com

Graham Brenton McKay is an independent architecture writer, critic, blogger and lecturer currently living in Dubai. His blog, Misfit’s Architecture, links an informal network of practitioners, instructors and students around the world. McKay deals with universal themes such as architecture’s relationship with art, nature, technology, society and education. Refusing to let the idea of social responsibility in architecture die, McKay highlights the foibles and dissects the statements of architecture media stars and the self-styled avant-garde. With equal regularity, he celebrates those misfit architects whose contribution to better performing buildings has never been fully appreciated, The Anonymous Architect being his most recent honoree. McKay is about to take up a position as Assistant Professor at the School of Public Architecture of Wenzhou-Kean University, in Wenzhou.

In general, people’s expectations of architecture go well beyond what we might think of as the bare minimum. After all, architecture is expected to (re)vitalize our cities and improve our lives, and this is definitely true at the level of function and amenity experienced and used first-hand. It’s also true that the people of a city can be proud of certain buildings or groups of buildings, and this kind of civic pride evokes a positive feeling often not even by direct experience of the architecture but by merely knowing that it exists. It’s an association and a possession of sorts, different from a virtual experience of a building which is intended to simulate in-person experience. Well before the advent of virtual tours and online media content, architects would show their clients sketches, perspectives and drawings that allowed to help them imagine the finished project and hopefully want it to exist. Still, we can say that pretty much all buildings are built with the intention of enriching people’s lives in one way or another.

Not only this, we can still have speculative, imaginative experiences of buildings that haven't yet been built or never will be. There’s a certain kind of pleasure to be found in imagining either what a structure would have been like or imagining a world in which a certain hypothetical structure did exist. Unbuilt buildings that have an architectural presence are said to have advanced the field of Architecture. If a citizen can be proud of a building they recognize but never use, then an architecture aficionado can appreciate virtual additions to a virtual category. This may explain the huge amount of architectural content consumed online.

My former professor Kazuo Shinohara advanced the notion that “houses are art” in 1963, and this has proven to be an idea that, once released into the world, grew wings and flew. The modern Japanese house with pretensions to art is a media staple that continues to shock, amuse, fascinate, and delight and, perhaps because of that, the art house as typology has spread throughout the world. What Shinohara was saying was that houses are architecture even though this was never really in dispute. But if houses/architecture are art and thus, by definition, capable of enhancing our well-being through mere proximity, then what is the content of that art? At what level do these arrangements of walls and openings affect our well-being? It's all very well to call for a nutritious architecture, but we need to identify the nature of those nutrients as well as the mechanisms that enable them to interact with and benefit the system.

There's a certain kind of architect, however, who is not curious to explore questions of wellbeing. They’ll more likely prefer to spend days inside a magnificent building like Chartres Cathedraleven if the nearest bathroom is a block away, as opposed to time spent in a more practical structure of middling aesthetic esteem. It's a variation of the form vs. function hobbyhorse that assumes form and function are mutually exclusive. Architects of this mind wish to create the impression that well-being is dependent on criteria more rarefied than those lower down Maslow's famous hierarchy. To me, it doesn’t say much about Architecture as Art if it is essential to maintain one's psyche in the same way that beta blockers manage cholesterol. Architecture is reduced to medication managing a pre-existing condition.

When words begin to go around in circles, it’s usually because we don't have the words or language to process the subject. The truth is, once we're outside the objective realm of how buildings satisfy physiological needs, we simply can't say a cause-and-effect relationship exists between architecture and well-being. The common belief that access to great architecture will make us better people, or at least make us believe we are, is to treat architecture as a drug. We arrive back at the same place. If Architecture that satisfies physiological needs is essential for our well-being, then we need to envision what that architecture would look like and how it would function. We can't keep claiming our inability to isolate this quality and its mechanism is proof of its sublime existence. That is architecture as belief system. If houses by definition enable the act of habitation then any artistic quality should take this defining function into account, for without it, it wouldn’t be a house. The challenge is to design and construct a house in a way that nurtures artistic qualities along with the everyday act of habitation (and for one's well-being promoted by the experience of that art). There shouldn't have to be a trade-off between the experience of a house as art and how one lives in it.

One common way of reconciling the two is to stylize the act of living into one or more spaces along with the items required to use those spaces. This gives us houses or apartments where the living room is the space that is the primary architectural experience. Our understanding of a house as either art or architecture is largely based on how well such spaces and items are designed into a single composition. The problem with this is that anything not designed as part of the original composition has the power to diminish or destroy any sense of the work as either architecture or art. This is particularly true if the elements creating the art are those vertical planar surfaces called walls, for walls are easily hidden and their appearance can be dramatically altered by cupboards, bookshelves, televisions, pictures, fish tanks, cuckoo clocks, etc. With this approach, we have to conclude that houses can be art only if people don’t inhabit them. This is a paradox. (It is true that Shinohara said he had no interest in his houses once they had been photographed and their owners had moved in, but he may have just been being provocative.)

Another approach towards reconciling living with the life-enhancing qualities of art is to assimilate all the paraphernalia of living into the design and to conceal all that can’t be in conceptually congruent storage cupboards. Oswald Unger’s 1995 House Without Qualities represents an extreme example of concealing architectural elements. In decades past this would have been called a Total Work Of Art. In passing, it’s remarkable how this rigid and ordered house functions just as well if not better than some of the more ostentatiously bespoke houses.

The far more popular approach to harmonizing art with everyday living is a dilution in which architecture and living express the same principles or values. Modernist houses tend to have Modernist furniture, for example, but the downside is the same in that one has to make one’s choices and live with them. Much of this sort of art goes no further than simply announcing itself as art.

The curated environment is what much interior design aspires to. It is our preferred method for creating a visual synthesis of architecture and lives led within. The act of living in the space is split between time spent appreciating it and time spent maintaining it. The occupant is an observer, not a participant. The trouble with the standard representations of Architecture as Art is that they almost always involve the selection and stylization of the paraphernalia of living into elements compatible with the architectural message as art. It’s a mutual compromise that produces bad art and bad living.

I haven't been out much lately. At left is a photo of my studio apartment in Dubai taken from the corner behind the bed. I spend a lot of time at that table staring out the window, wondering what to write and, when I’m not doing that, I look at my walls and windows and wonder what they mean. In this photo you can see my three pleasures of cooking/eating in the distance, the television for music and film in the middle-ground and, in the foreground, my desk and laptop for writing and communications. That covers most of my life. The air is de-humidified, filtered and tempered to 23.5°C. It's my bubble, my shelf on the 45th floor, my space station. There’s food stored away in the cupboards. There’s sources of energy and water. There are options for entertainment and communications. This apartment meets my base physiological needs and goes a fair way to meeting my psychological ones too.

It's not huge. For a while, I moved all the furniture away from the walls to give me options for getting from one place to another. I wasn't about to start running marathons but I did try to exercise using the fire-escape stairs as a Stairmaster and soon discovered I was pushing past my maximum heart rate of 160 bpm. Using the car park as a running track was less brutal, and the prospect of cardiac arrest there was less terrifying.

I preferred level four as my running track because from there, I could see the frangipani and Poinciana trees on top of the neighbouring podium. It’s true – plants are good for us. It was good to feel the heat and hear what noises of the city were there to hear because my apartment has neither balcony nor openable window. I never thought I could live in an enclosed apartment, but, in Dubai, I don’t mind. It's now early May and already 40°C outside. For the past two days, there's been a dust storm.

All I ask of windows now is that they inform me of what's going on outside. I think it was Zaha Hadid who once said she could live in a small apartment if it had an interesting view. I appreciate how the long side of my apartment has the curtain wall and, though I never lack something to look at, there is such a thing as too much light between May and July. It was open space I was missing. Someone had left the stairwell door to the rooftop open, so I climbed the ladder and stood on the roof of the elevator shaft. This was no garden, but it felt good to have nothing but sky above.

02 My desire for space and open space arose because of the building’s highly segmented design, but I was able to transcend these limitations by repurposing certain spaces within the building itself. The car park and rooftop weren't designed for me to use and enjoy the way I did. These experiences were elemental pleasures and not aesthetic ones generated and mediated by culture or education. I read that, in Berlin, people have been projecting films onto blank walls overlooked by at least twenty apartments. In the evenings, people go out onto their balconies and enjoy a building in a manner for which it was not designed. This is the creative use of buildings.

Back inside at my table, I admire the way whoever designed this apartment, used the 1.5 x 1.5 metre column to divide the kitchen and bathroom from the living space. I appreciate this column being there, what it does, and how it looks like it is holding up a building. It owes me no more than that. I don’t begrudge its size. I appreciate how the curtain wall is slightly raked and independent of the column. Between the two is a small space that doesn’t suggest any use but, if I had a cat, I bet it would claim that space as its own. Instead, it’s home to my ironing board, vacuum cleaner, and laundry drying rack.

I’ve been thinking of an architecture in which different systems are simply juxtaposed and allowed to interact. Outside, my door is the building system that I newly interact with via the car park and rooftop. Inside is the apartment system that I move around and interact with in mostly expected ways as far as activities and the placement of furniture is concerned, but I also interact with the space in unplanned ways, as far as the column system, the curtain wall system, and my things are concerned.

I’ve been carrying this idea around for decades and have only just been able to articulate it. When I was a student of Shinohara’s, I would often be asked to accompany visitors to the atelier on tours of houses whose owners were amenable to such visits. The owners of House in Uehara were very accommodating and I took visitors there at least three times. In the photograph below you can see this house has concrete struts rising diagonally from the floor. On one visit, the far fork held a month’s worth of newspapers prior to being bundled and recycled. Beneath the near fork on the floor were the two cats’ bowls where they wouldn’t be kicked.

If ever you lay down on a sofa to have a nap and you pull a throw blanket over yourself even though you’re not cold, it’s because your body is more comfortable when it’s allowed to find its own thermal equilibrium. I suspect a similar relationship exists between us and our living spaces, and that we’re more comfortable when we simply live in them in ways that make sense to us. An architecture that is less prescriptive, but rich in potential for us to arbitrarily engage with it, just might make us feel more alive in these places where we spend so much of our time.