A Sense of Place: Building an Environment With Words

Street corner. Stop light. Dog on a leash. Woman with yellow boots. Umbrellas crowding the sidewalk. Green Light. The simple reading of a group of words can trigger thoughts and ideas in the mind that lets you imagine a particular place. By designating elements around an environment, a more detailed picture can be painted. At first, “street corner” puts an image in your head. Maybe it’s a corner in New York, or L.A., or maybe a small town in Kansas. “Stop light” then gives a detail of what is on the street corner, putting you in an urban area. “Dog on a leash” suggests other people around you. “Woman with yellow boots” is almost immediately connected with bad weather no matter who you ask. “Umbrellas crowding the sidewalk” is yet another concrete indication of bad weather, but more specifically rain. “Green light” suggests movement, a sense of moving through a space by simply reading a small group of words.

It is with this view of how we perceive the world around us that Heidegger tries to explain his theories of building and dwellings. Heidegger sees each space, each environment as a collection of words. We interpret the space around us in our minds based on words. It has been ingrained in our minds to think this way. Our earliest memories are forgotten, they have no bearing of concept, no subject to relate to. Everything we perceive in our younger years is a new experience. It is only later in life that we apply meaning to experiences linked directly to a word. For example, when you first learned what the stove was. Did you know the stove was going to hurt you when you touched it? No, but you did. It hurt, you started crying, and what did your mother say when she came to your aid? “No! Hot! Hot!” From then on, you associate the word “hot” with touching the stove. It is this take on language that leads us to how we perceive literature, why a book can be so transforming. Reading a book can take you into another place. You instantly transform your surroundings after reading just a few words. A good author can evoke the most basic human instincts, send you into an imaginary realm, or even make your emotions run wild. An architect is the author of a building. Our interpretation of space is how we perceive it in our minds.

In an attempt to reverse the idea, we were given a sketch problem. We were to imagine a space, and use words to describe how we would want it to look. This is different because it is not standing in a space and describing it, but imagining how we would interpret a space. The sketch associated here is based on explanation of how I would see the space through the use of words. More specifically, a hotel in which you I would be staying. The words used to describe the space are what I would want the environment to be. The lines created show linkage between different elements, and explanations of why they are linked. Visually, you can understand which elements are most important based on the number of lines extended from it. The more of the lines that extend off, the more important it is. I see a space that is mainly comfortable. A place I can go, that feels as much like home as possible. I also see a place that lets me have fun. Whether its at the hotel restaurant or bar, or a hot tub, or the nightlife around the area.

In relation to other, already built designs, it is hard to associate this overall theory to their spaces. Since seeing a picture of a building does not have any words. Your mind cannot imagine what the place looks like based on words since it is already interpreted into a visual context. To try and illustrate this point and expand on the pre-mentioned theory, I have chosen a building by the firm PLOT, here in Copenhagen. The building is a youth centre on the island of Amager. For the purpose of this exercise, I tried to not look at any pictures, but focus on the description of the design to help me see what the building looked like, and how the spaces were arranged.

Amager is the big, often rather messy island in the Copenhagen complex. It is where traffic from the bridge over the Sound to Sweden arrives in Denmark. Østamager (East Amager) is a strange area in which run-down industry is mixed with thriving sailing clubs, the latest of which is the maritime youth centre on Sundby harbour.
In the haphazard tatterdemalion surroundings of sheds and abandoned industrial buildings, the new centre stands out as an organized oasis. It is not so much a building as a landscape, a wooden one that undulates between harbour and Sound. Since Foreign Office Architects completed their pier in Yokohama (AR January 2003), such artificial landscapes have become common on the drawing boards of students and young architects, but few of them are based on anything more than fashion and delight in being able to manipulate non-Euclidean geometry. At Østamager, there are reasons for the strategy. The ground is heavily polluted with heavy metals, and the cost of excavating the site and removing the toxic material would have been beyond the means of the client (the Copenhagen Commune), so the architects decided to cover the plot with a 2100m2 deck. Its undulations both shelter dinghies and provide an eventful play surface.
Two separate single-storey buildings are enfolded by the deck. The L-shaped eastern one has social facilities such as the sailing club room and a general purpose space complete with a kitchen. In the opposite corner of the rectangular wooden landscape is a block that contains workshops, locker rooms and boat hall. Both buildings have vertical glass walls through which they are entered, but their other faces are formed of curving, sloping wood over which the users run, sit and play. Clearly, there is a danger that people involved in energetic activities could fall off the roof down the glass cliffs. To avoid this, balustrades top the potentially dangerous places; they are one of the most successful parts of the whole design, with widely-spaced thin stainless-steel balusters joined by stainless-steel mesh. In some countries, and in other hands, the balustrades could have been extremely visually heavy and the death of the project, but at Sundby, the metal rails are not obtrusive and from some angles they almost disappear. Not all the details are so felicitous, for instance detailing of the vertical walls is a bit clumsy in places, but it has to be remembered that this project (part of the commune’s Østamager improvement project) had to be created on a small budget so it was necessary to use off-the-shelf components.
The jury was most impressed by the architects’ imaginative response to limited resources and their ingenious command of new geometries.
--Taken from Architectural Review, ar+d prize winner article

After reading this article, you can immediately get a sense of how the building’s spaces can visually be perceived. Once done with the article, looking at the photos was a similar experience, yet I was intrigued to see those details which were not depicted and did not imagine.