16 minute read
Architecture of the In-Between
Heron Hall stair detail
photo by Iklil Gregg
architecture of the in-between
BY JASON F. MCLENNAN WITH KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI
There is architecture, and there is mere building. The line between the two is measured by the skill of the designer and her ability to help transform the level of the quality of the experience - regardless of how profound or mundane the purpose of the building. In other words, great design does not have to be reserved for cathedrals or large civic structures. Any building, regardless of its intended use, however humble, can be elevated through careful and considered design. The simple designs of Sam Mockbee for example, show how even the most prosaic of uses can be elevated to a rich architectural experience. On the spectrum’s other end, we’ve all seen large, highly visible “important” buildings that are a true disappointment in their design and miss the opportunity to delight, edify and enrich their surroundings. They are merely “construction” or “building” serving a utilitarian purpose perhaps, but without style, proportion, and any sense of design. It is not the purpose of the thing nor scale that matters most – but the quality of it.
While there are many ways that buildings can be elevated from mere building to architecture – an attempt to record them all is the topic for an entire book or series of books. This article focuses on just one of the key ways that may not be obvious to some: the thoughtful articulation and celebration of in-between spaces – the so called “unassignable” or non-programmed spaces found in every structure. In particular, we focus here on the hallways and staircases we need for circulation.
-Denise Scott Brown
Stairs and Hallways: Transforming the In-Between
To overlook stairwells and hallways is to miss some of the most profound and important opportunities to elevate design and to improve the experience of a building’s inhabitants.
Since the invention of the elevator in 1853 - one that made skyscrapers a possibility and gave rise to the kind of urban density only possible by utilizing vertical space - the glamorous, sweeping stairways that were the hallmark of the past began to disappear. In Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator, Andreas Bernard chronicles the rise and reign of the elevator and the subsequent disappearance of the grand staircase: “In the course of only one or two decades, the traditional means of vertical access was pushed into the background, downgraded from a grandiose structural element occupying the centre of a floor to a mere escape route.” 1 For the most part, this relegation to the background is still in effect today, even in low and mid-rise buildings where stairs could still play a major design role.
My belief is that stairs are one of the most important places within a building to build community, offering opportunities for chance encounters and informal conversations while connecting people visually and conceptually to multiple levels within a structure. Done right, the staircase becomes a world unto its own – a place to linger, to get views outside (and with it important biophilic connections), a place to reflect, to connect and to be active. This latter feature has finally returned the stairs to a larger discussion of the architect’s role in the promotion of public health through active design. The “irresistible stairwell” has been praised for its potential as an alluring novelty, one that, if given the proper attention in design, can entice even the most sedentary into action. Signage at the Bullitt Center alerts guests to the fact that - while the average American gains a pound a year - were one to ascend the Bullitt Center stairwell twice daily, that same American would instead lose 1.5 pounds over the course of the year. The Center for Active Design (CAD) specifically designates stairs as an opportunity for increased health of occupants if they are “accessible, visible, attractive and well-lit.” CAD’s building checklist encourages everything from locating stairs near elevators with signage that encourages use of the former over the latter, to the use of quality materials and the addition of art, music, views and natural ventilation to make them more appealing. 2
The success of the Bullitt Center “irresistible stair” is in its view and rich material palette. The Seattle skyline is visible on three sides, making this a natural meeting place in the building.
CC BY-SA 2.0 Taomeister 10
Whether the opportunity missed in the fire stair is chiefly a health one or aesthetic in nature, internally focused, industrialmaterial finished, fluorescent-lighted stairwells accomplish little more than code compliance and represent significant missed opportunities for architectural expression and beauty. Special attention to this design element can have positive effects on both the figurative and literal human heart and I argue that the placement and design of the staircases often is more important to the conception of a building than the rooms programmed within it.
While an obvious, more than aesthetics based case for stairs might be made, other circulation routes throughout a building, specifically hallways, are just as often-overlooked design opportunities. All too often, hallways are begrudged as an unfortunate utilitarian necessity and minimized as much as codes will allow in pursuit of net-to-gross ratios that are as high as possible for maximum short-term gain. In the case of these circulation spaces (and with the exception of lobbies which are often oversized and garishly appointed), economics are against the architect.
Soul Deadening Transitions
Complete lack of attention to fire stairs ensures building occupants will only find occasion to use them if literally being chased by flames.
Hospitals and hotels have long given the word “corridor” a negative connotation.
If we begin to think about hallways as vital places unto their own, in which people encounter other people, and are invariably enriched by their interaction, they take on more importance. And while an occupant’s waistline might be less affected by a hallway than by taking the stairs, his mental health can be supported by the artful design of hallways that incorporate daylight and views to the outside. In the end, we attribute the least value to these spaces that ironically may have the most value in determining the mental health and quality of life within a building. When we are inhabiting the rooms within a building we are typically engaged in some kind of specific activity – a bedroom is for sleeping, a kitchen for cooking, a work area for working. But it is the hallways that represent the break or completion of an activity, in-between spaces where we are most alert, most open to change. We use these spaces to literally transition from one mental mode to another, and, I believe it is precisely this time that we most need a quality experience that engages the senses rather than a mundane or ugly one that diminishes our sensory experience.
In A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, much attention is given to the subject of circulation, passageways and corridors: “Long sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture. In fact, the ugly long repetitive corridors of the machine age have so far infected the word ‘corridor’ that it is hard to imagine that a corridor could ever be a place of beauty.” 3 We’re all familiar with the images the word “corridor” conjures: sterile hallways of hospitals, blinding white, with a seeming infinite number of rooms tacked on, or dark and often dingy hotel corridors, with any number of insufficient decorative elements attempting to lessen the drudgery – patterned, plush carpeting, ornate sconces, wainscoting, the occasional mirror – where even a walk of a couple hundred feet feels interminable under foot.
As it turns out, these types of corridors have a proven, negative psychological effect on the human brain. Harvard Medical School Department of Psychology researcher Mayer Spivack published Sensory Distortions in Tunnels and Corridors in 1967, a paper that examined the effects of architecture on mental hospital patients. In his introduction, he notes that upon beginning his research, “I was sufficiently unfamiliar with mental hospitals to be especially sensitive to new experiences. I was soon powerfully aware that I spent most of my time traversing extremely long, unvarying corridors. Such spaces, commonly encountered in mental hospitals, are inappropriate in a milieu for emotionally disturbed patients and have long been criticized by architects and psychiatrists.” 4 This work goes on to examine the extent to which these types of corridors distort verbal communication, create disorienting visual distortions, and, when too narrow, trigger anxiety in sensitive populations.
Despite the intuition and scientific corroboration, in most developer-driven buildings, circulation spaces are minimized in order to maximize the building’s efficiency. Worse, they are always shunted completely to the interior, so as to completely separate us from daylight and views where we need them most. Again, I believe it is the in-between spaces that offer the most potential for a true biophilic connection to the outdoors, one that people who spend most of their time indoors so sorely need.
-David Whyte
The Art of the Intangible
Our impressions are shaped in large part by intangibles. Mozart famously said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” Thinking of stairwells and hallways as “the silence between” hints at the potential impact of these design elements within a building. These are the spaces in which, if successful, a sense of expectation rises, where our senses come alive with possibility and anticipation, where the mind is unprogrammed, free to circulate between thoughts in a way that mimics its body’s circulation between rooms. Though the effects of poor design in hallways and stairs may not be as pronounced on the average building occupant as on Spivack’s mental hospital inhabitants, there is no neutral effect. “In a building where the movement is mean, the passages are dark and narrow – rooms open off them as dead ends; you spend your time entering the building, or moving between rooms, like a crab scuttling in the dark.”
The old adage that life is about the journey and not the destination is a fitting reminder when we think of circulation through a building. It is the journey between spaces that is most magical, often more so than the rooms, or destinations, themselves. In a given home or office, we spend a lot of time “journeying.” It is in times of transition that chance encounters occur, and the spaces through which one moves are where one’s sense of arrival and departure is generated. Further, it is a critical opportunity to feel connected to others and the outdoors.
Beyond mental excitement and anticipation and personal connection, there is a quality of possibility inhabited by the mind while the body is in movement. We seek this soothing and productive mental space intuitively, this is why we have walking meditations, or take a walk around the block when stumped on a problem or task. Physical movement engenders dynamic, solutions-oriented, out-of-the-box thinking. When we are in a particular room we are often oriented to a particular task, but when we travel – down a hallway, up or down stairs, along the edge of a courtyard – we are in-between mental modes and our mental landscape shifts to a more expansive arena, rich with opportunity and possibility. If the design of circulatory spaces can support us accessing this mental space, we should assign a higher importance to these places, not seek to minimize them as unprofitable, unusable and unfortunate necessities.
In the body, circulation refers to blood and the life-giving oxygen it carries. In a home or office building, we might think of circulation spaces in the same way, and as such, they are critical. “The building with generous circulation allows each person’s instincts and intuitions full play. The building with ungenerous circulation inhibits them.” 5 As in every other aspect of design, in circulatory spaces, there is no neutral effect. Either design supports the intended experience or thwarts it. Attention paid to these critical elements of design is attention paid to the success of the design as a whole.
Key transitions places help a person orient themselves within a building and to the outside world, blurring the in and out which is so important to our connection with life. 6
A single-loaded corridor in Heron Hall that connects the main hall with the master suite.
Photo by Dan Banko.
It’s the Circulation, Stupid!
Show me great architecture that you love, and nine times out of ten a very particular attention has been paid to the circulatory spaces within, so much so, that moving around in the building takes on a special and even spiritual dimension.
I probably had my own epiphany about the importance of in-between spaces when I had the great luck of attending the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, spending a year in the amazing masterpiece that Mackintosh created (which has just so tragically burned down) as well as spending time in other buildings he designed, like Hill House in Helensburgh. Mackintosh was an architect that understood how to bring a building to life through its hallways and staircases. His circulation spaces are so successful that you want to spend as much time as possible within them, marveling at the proportions, materials, artwork and harmony of the whole. Mackintosh always designed spaces that connected multiple rooms through single-sided corridors, sized to linger, with ample light. His staircases had their own three-dimensional volumes and were not tucked thoughtlessly within a building; they expressed themselves on the elevations and were consistently bold on the interior. Because they are so much about the experience of transition – from one space to an amazing connector space and then into a completely different space – his structures are hard to define without visiting them.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover
Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover’s stairwell is its own volume, generously sized, with ample natural light and views to nature outside.
Photo by Jason F. McLennan
When viewed from the outside, the full expression of the stair volume is clear.
Photo by Jason F. McLennan
House for an Art Lover’s corridor is single loaded, with ample natural light provided by deep, seated alcoves off its outside wall.
Photo by Jason F. McLennan
A window seat alcove in a corridor of House for an Art Lover.
Photo by Jason F. McLennan
My first real understanding of the genius of Le Corbusier was similar. From the textbooks I had misunderstood and underappreciated his work – an oversight quickly corrected through visiting and experiencing first hand the light, shadow, movement and flow through his spaces that elevated his architecture. Two dimensional photographs can’t accurately portray the interplay of these qualities, and, in fairness, small black and white photographs in my textbooks didn’t help either. Touring the Villa Savoye with friends in the summer of 1995 turned this house from one of my least favorites to one of my most. The stairs, ramps, decks and walkways caught my interest and changed my perception of space more so than the rooms themselves.
Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye
To fully appreciate Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, I had to visit it in person and experience the play of light and shadow and movement throughout the hallways and stairwells, both inside and out.
CC 2.0 scarletgreen
CC BY-SA 3.0 Valueyou
CC BY-ND 2.0 End User
Time and again, the most wonderful buildings to visit and experience are those where the in-between is elevated to the profound – something architects like Alto, Saarinen and Wright, among others I greatly admire, just got right.
Heron Hall, for example, is all about its stair – my own homage to Mackintosh – and hallways meant for living and being in. The Silver Rock house, under construction now, contains a main hallway that we coined “the hallway of life,” a title that recognizes it as the central nervous system and organizing principle of the entire home.
In our larger, commercial buildings the same expressions hold true – with three dimensional stairs and hallways that look out onto green spaces and courtyards wherever possible.
As our young firm continues to design and build more Living Buildings and Net Zero structures all over the world, look out for how we celebrate these often-overlooked spaces. One of the ways we achieve this is by utilizing the following design principles interpreted in different ways appropriate for each project and site:
-Emily Dickinson
McLennan Design Architecture
There is a running joke in my office that I have an obsession with stairs and hallways – and I readily admit it! It is more than mere fetish. In our work, we believe in pulling out and celebrating stairs wherever possible, giving them three-dimensional form and purpose, all with the intention that they become part of the overall, lived experience of the building that houses them. Fire stairs should be celebrated, along with any other vertical connection that usually plays a role in passively tempering a building and contributing to its energy performance.
We believe these key transition places help a person orient themselves within a building and to the outside world, blurring the in and out, which is so important to our connection with life. Wherever possible, our hallways are single loaded, utilize daylight and visual sight lines to the outdoors, and are generously sized to allow for leisure activities, a place to sit, and chance encounters.
McLennan Design – Design Principles
Mystery + Whimsy
Humans are excitable and enjoy feeling surprise, delight, and wonder. We can conjure these emotions with clever design that incorporates mystery and whimsy. Each project, while being basically ordered, needs to create moments of pure joy by carefully incorporating novelty, biophilic or nostalgic artifacts, and subtle wayfinding into its design.
Elevating In Between Spaces
The most important places in a building are often the interstices. It is these in-between spaces - staircases, hallways, transitions, porches, vestibules - that define whether something is mere building or architecture. Special attention given to these areas elevates the overall design of a building.
Clarity of Wayfinding
Carefully chosen, subtle design elements should be utilized in a space to direct users imperceptibly and almost intuitively. This can look like discreet material changes that mimic pathways, lighting techniques, and deliberate site lines. People should not get lost in spaces, they should be guided through them without their realization.
Thickened Transitions
To signal and bring attention to subtle or pronounced shifts in function and feel from one space within a building to the next, we utilize thickened transitions. These transition spaces serve to alert and prepare occupants for those shifts and should be pronounced in relation to the degree of function shift between the places they connect. This plays into an overall design application that subtly curates the psychological experience in the built environment.
Compression + Release
Closely connected to the principle of thickened transitions, compression and release promotes our ability to read and intuitively experience a space. When moving from one space to the next, compression in the transition signals the shift and creates expectation for release, which, when delivered, is experienced both literally and psychologically.
Stairs as Volumes
Stairs are wasted when tucked within an overall volume. We believe in expressing and celebrating stairs and giving them threedimensionality by creating separate volumes or special niches within volumes to highlight them.
Everything Beautiful
Design is meant to be a complete experience, attractive from all angles. No component of a design is too small to be exempt from consideration. Even the most mundane of structures should be given careful consideration – we are surrounded by too much poor design. Our design strives for more. •
END NOTES
1] Bernard, Andreas. Lifted: a Cultural History of the Elevator. New York University Press, 2014. 2] Center for Active Design Checklist: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Design. New York: Center for Active Design, 2010. https:// centerforactivedesign.org/dl/guidelines.pdf, accessed November 20, 2018. 3] Alexander, Christopher, et. al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 4] Spivak, Mayer. Sensory Distortions in Tunnels and Corridors. Boston: Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, 1967. 5] Alexander, Christopher, et. al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 6] Alexander, Christopher, et. al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977
JASON F. McLENNAN is a highly sought out designer, consultant and thought leader. Prior to founding McLennan Design, Jason authored the Living Building Challenge – the most stringent and progressive green building program in existence, and founded the International Living Future Institute. He is the author of six books on Sustainability and Design including the Philosophy of Sustainable Design, “the bible for green building.”
KRISTINA AVRAMOVIC OLDANI is a storyteller who believes in the importance of words and the power of wellappointed language to create change. Her work grows from a deep reverence and gratitude for wild places and the experiences to be had in them. In return, she uses her words to urge people to consider their integral part in a natural world.
