I just had a charming young student come to interview me for a small campus publication, which was great fun (who doesn't want to talk about themselves? Not me!), but she knocked me off balance slightly when, in the middle of my usual long explanation of the importance of considering the connections between cognition and architecture, she asked:
"What about culture?"
This must have been a set-up. Someone must have let her inside my head a few moments before she walked through the door in order for her to know that it had just been filled with interactions between space and culture.
We're in the middle of designing a few very detailed virtual versions of some fine looking houses (and by 'we' I mean mostly the gifted people from our School of Architecture who labour over the code while I find the money to pay them, and then put on the virtual reality headset and go "Ooh" and "Ahh") that we'll eventually stick into the heads of a group of active housebuyers whom we hope to recruit from realtors' offices. They'll wander around, get a bit lost from time to time, marvel over the little details on the cabinets, the hardwood floors, the fireplaces. We'll watch where they go, ask them what they like, and try to get them to imagine that they're actually in these interesting little spaces. And in a very real sense, they will be in these spaces in a way that is hard for anyone to imagine who has not put on one of these devices. It's a wonder of the human mind, this facility we have for transportability from one place to another at the drop of a switch.
One of our longer term goals is to look at questions of culture. Once they stop shivering, what do people who move to Canada from Iran or Somalia make of our built spaces? I've written about some of the more dramatic effects of jarring mismatches between culture and space -- the Paris riots of 2004, even perhaps 9/11 -- but what about the subtle effects of living in a house that rubs one's cultural predilection for privacy, for example, the wrong way?
I've been going through a fabulous new edition of Hermann Muthesius' classic three volume book The English House, where he tries to explain much of the revered English way of life in terms related to architecture and design. Muthesius seems to have genuinely believed that much of the economic and social advantages of the English in comparison with Continental Europe early in the 20th century was connected with the ways that the English arranged space. Could where we put hallways, doors and chairs in our houses, the ways that the shapes of rooms allow us to place our furnishings really have such a profound effect on how we feel and what we think?
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