Interesting interview with a blind writer...

Excerpt from a transcript from an ACB National Radio interview with a blind writer - Rebecca Maxwell - and an architect - Peter-John Cantrill  - about architecture.

In a world were buildings are predominantly judged by what they look like, how does someone without sight measure whether a building is a good one or a bad one?

"I began by remarking to her that if I were to describe a building, my description would start with what it looks like. So how would Rebecca's description start?
Rebecca:
I think I'd start with the floor plan. It's very important to me to be able to internalise the being of that building. I don't just happen from space to space; any building I'm going to familiarise myself with has to be in an internal map, and really, if I were to give you a parallel experience, I could ask you to close your eyes and put yourself in your bedroom at night, and then imagine the layout of your house, and you would have a spatial experience I think.
Interviewer:
How do you get a sense of the floor plan? Does this mean that you have to walk the perimeters?
Rebecca Maxwell:
Probably I wouldn't say the perimeters, because I probably wouldn't circumnavigate every room, but I'd begin with let's say the final column, the skeleton of the building, so it would be the hallways and how spaces radiate from that, and then I'd do the second level of enriching my inner map, and that would mean getting a sense of each of the rooms. And that then goes beyond the floor plan. It also becomes a sense of the three dimensions of the room, and where there are places that let in the outside, that actually brings a space to life. If I can feel the air or the presence of balcony or garden, or whatever.
Interviewer:
Now you talk about getting a more three dimensional sense. Like a lot of people I think given a choice, I prefer high ceilings to low ceilings, because I think they look more elegant; but are you aware of ceiling height when you're in a room?
Rebecca Maxwell:
Oh, very much so. A low ceiling, well I don't know that it's a low ceiling, I feel an oppression that I work out by checking with someone else eventually, that it is connected with a low ceiling, or a disproportion of the space. I can't be geometrically accurate about that, but there are proportions that are comfortable and proportions that aren't, and the ceiling height is an important part.
Alan Saunders:
Is that sense of oppression connected to any of what we think of as the five, perhaps we might call them the five traditional senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste, or is it a separate sense, as it were?
Rebecca Maxwell:
Well if one had to connected it to the five senses, one might say it's the sense of touch, but it's touch without a conventional physical contact. But I believe that there are a lot more senses. We haven't identified them and we don't use them. I think by identifying them we would begin to turn them on, as it were. You see, I think there is a sense of pressure, a sense of balance, a sense of rhythm, a sense of movement, a sense of life, a sense of warmth, even a sense of self, which psychology is beginning to recognise.
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Interviewer:
... Do you think that architecture can offer a rewarding haptic experience?
Rebecca Maxwell:
I'm glad you used that word in that way; I find myself an only person using it that way. Yes, look I take delight in the shapes of columns and the textures of walls in buildings, and I love to find apses and spaces that have no meaning at all. Yes, I think architecture could delight us more by focusing on other senses indeed.
Interviewer:
I think you like visiting the National Gallery of Victoria, because of the water wall near its main entrance.
Rebecca Maxwell:
I do, I do indeed, and it isn't just that I'm just as embarrassing as you are to other people, play in the water and all that, but the water has a revivifying sense, it feels as though renewal is happening all the time, and respiration is gratified by a different balance in the air.
Interviewer:
You were talking about smoothing through a house and getting a sense of where there's a balcony and so on, where the outside air and sound is admitted; is your sense of the layout of a building altered at all if it's air-conditioned rather than naturally ventilated?
Rebecca Maxwell:
Yes, an air-conditioned building feels dead. It has lost one of its features, one of its distinctions. It becomes all amorphous, too homogenous, and even the size of spaces is lost, yes, an air-conditioned building torments me, actually.
Interviewer:
So what message would you like to deliver to architects, any architects who might be listening, about what they should be aiming to achieve in their work as far as the senses are concerned?
Rebecca Maxwell:
Well I would say the main thing that anyone can do is to give a bit of time to thinking about what senses they may have that they haven't thought of, and just live with them, and then if it's an architect, try and feed that sense, gratify that sense, so that we're not half dead in our sensibilities.
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Interviewer:
Well I'm joined now by Peter-John Cantrill, who lectures in architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney, and is a Director of the architecture firm, Zanis Associates. Peter-John, welcome to The Comfort Zone, a virtual space that definitely favours the sense of hearing over sight.
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Peter-John Cantrill:
... we have a wonderful outpouring of knowledge of architecture through the visual media, the print media in particular, and although this is a fantastic thing for architecture, it does have some side effects. And two of the most unfortunate side effects are to do with this concentration on the visual, without the other senses, the first being that you can't, when you open a magazine, smell the building, you can't sense the volume of the space, you can't feel the air moving through it, or the warmth of the sunlight. It's impossible to convey that through photographs only. And this leads architects to concentrate more on the visual, because they know that more and more their clients understand their buildings through media representations of them, rather than visiting them. This also leads to another unfortunate consequence, where more and more often, buildings are discussed through the criticis' understanding simply of their representation. The media is so competitive that the first magazine to publish a building often sells more. So if you can discuss the building before its completion, then you're first involved, so to speak.
The other thing is, the critics can extend this and discuss buildings before they're built and even discuss buildings that will never be built, and so I'm disappointed in a way this tendency towards discussing architecture without ever being there, without even the building being built.
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Interviewer:
A celebrated American architect, the late Charles Moore, once designed a house that I think Rebecca Maxwell would probably like very much. So tell us about his house for a blind person.
Peter-John Cantrill:
Yes, he did design a house for a blind client in California, and he found this the most delightful building that he had designed as a house. And in describing the house, I saw him describe it, I haven't been to visit it, it was a wonderful description. The house was oriented by a series of rooms containing scented plants, containing water, things that made noise, that gave you a sense of smell. There was within every room things to touch to remind you of the room that you were in, to help you find your way around. I found his description of that that house to be a wondrous thing, it's a place I'd dearly like to visit.
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... in the late baroque period in particular, and particularly in Germany and Austria, places like that, one judgment of a good architect was that you could walk into the church and just inside the entry, if you stamped your foot or clapped your hand, the whole room would resound like a beautiful bell. … The buildings were judged by their sound, not just their visual experience.
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Interviewer:
The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor was in this country recently, and he designed, didn't he, a pavilion at the 2000 World Expo that was a very successful multi-century experience?
Peter-John Cantrill:
Yes, a delightful pavilion, the Swiss Pavilion there. It consisted of timber that had been cut and had not yet been dried, that was stacked, and the idea for the pavilion is that that timber would later be reused in buildings. But during the Expo the timber was drying and you could hear the creaking and groaning of the timber as it dried, you could sell the resin and tannin and other things coming out of the timber, the building was open to the elements in many parts, and so as you walked through, you the rain would fall on you, you could hear the sound of the rain hitting the timber and so forth. It's quite a delightful place.
Interviewer:
So it's clear that although most architecture these days seems to be odourless, that doesn't actually have to be the case.
Peter-John Cantrill:
No, and in fact a lot of architecture isn't odourless, it's often the smell of the concrete curing or the chemicals in the paint which you can sometimes be overcome with in a new building. Traditionally, buildings built of more natural materials are imbued with the odour of those materials. But timber itself more often than not today is treated with sealants that seal the smells in, and you can treat timber with more traditional products that allow them to imbue the space with their smell. Some of these products, like you can oil a floor with polyurethane, which is hard-wearing and long-lasting and low maintenance, and kill the smell of the timber. You could oil the floor with a mixture of tung oil and citrus oils and bring out the most delightful smell of the timber for years. It's a difficult choice, because an oiled floor in the traditional way needs a lot more maintenance, and will not wear as evenly as a floor treated in the newer way.
Interviewer:
The place where I store some of my excess stuff is a former wool storage place, and so the floorboards are utterly coated in lanolin, which is a really a lovely smell. Unfortunately I'm told, highly inflammable, but a lovely smell.
Peter-John Cantrill:
It is a wonderful smell, that's certainly true.
Alan Saunders:
Several years ago we had the Finnish architecture theorist, Juhani Pallasmaa, on the show, arguing that to be truly meaningful, architecture should awaken all the senses. And when I said to him that it wasn't immediately clear that there was any connection between architecture and the sense of taste, he begged to differ, and this is what he said:
"Architect: To me, it is, I have experience on a number of occasions that certain qualities of stone, for instance, certain metals, detailing of wood, can be so subtle that you feel it in your mouth, and I'm myself, in my own work, conscious of that possibility. I don't think it is an essential quality of architecture, but I have made the observation that architecture can be subtle enough to even evoke a sensation of taste. Maybe 20 years ago in California was just about to enter a grey, rough stone building by the Green Brothers and when I opened the door, I saw the shining white marble threshhold, and that whiteness of marble juxtaposed with the rough stone almost made me automatically kneel and taste the surface with my tongue."
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I think the sense of smell and the sense of taste are very closely allied, and quite often the smell of a building, you can sense as taste. I can understand what he's saying.
Interviewer:
What about the sense of touch, Peter? The machine-made materials favoured by contemporary architects tend to eliminate accidental variations and tend towards uniformity, so that doesn't allow for much of a haptic experience, does it?
Peter-John Cantrill:
It certainly reduces that experience to one where your sense of touch is always cold and smooth, and the variety of things that you can touch is much wider than that. So again, more natural materials offer a greater variety of touch sensation: timber or brick and stone and so forth, but they do have difficulties, in that they're not even. People see them as, they see weathering as being a distasteful thing in a way, that things change and develop texture.
Interviewer:
Well that's yes, that is interesting, because weatherboards today don't weather and splinter, paint isn't allowed to flake off walls. So the avenue for tactility is eliminated, isn't it?
Peter-John Cantrill:
Well if that's your attitude, it certainly is, or it's restricted, and you have a certain narrower palette of materials to use for touch. But all these natural materials and others are all still available for use in buildings today.
Interviewer:
Are we just afraid of ageing?
Peter-John Cantrill:
Perhaps we are, but I'm certainly not. I find that when I see a well-weathered building, that's what delights me, and when I see a building that's kind of caught in its moment of conception and destined never to change, I'm a little saddened.
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