- said Elisabeth Cha - "...so I want to be an architect"
Elisabeth Cha studies architecture in Liege in Belgium. She seems to be very talented and passionate about what she does but recently she had some downs and wasn't sure about the directions she wanted to take in her future carreer.
What she told me made me think. I also like space a lot but on the other hand I have a lot of problems with it. Sometimes it makes me feel lost, sometimes it frightens me when I discover lonelines in space. Sometimes space makes me happy when I am walking on a street I start seing it automatically in section as in a simple urban study that shows the proportions of space. Most of the times though I have difficulty in thourougly understanding the space. I only recall a couple of moments during, say, last 12 months, when I was deeply moved by the presence of the surrounding. Every time it happened it actually involved a couple of senses in the same time. Strong presence of people was also required for the overall experience. How do you call a state fo yourself when all your senses are hypeactive in the same time? One might argue that only then you truly feel a space when you experience that kind of state.
It might seem that more interesting are objects. Maybe not more interesting but easier to understand. I see objects everywhere, shapes appear and speak to me in most unexpected places. Shapes can be materialistic and durable or can be made out of shadows that overlap with glittering lights. Shapes also appear when something in the foreground is overlayed with other things in the background and then the small and distant parts dispersed in undefined space start composing a single entity. These shapes are oftentimes very strange. I feel most passionate about the shapes that are strange, that don't reveal their nature on the first encounter and also, when they don't let you know easily about the way they where rendered.
Experiencing space is something that requires a person's true presence in the concrete place. An objects nature is much more visual. Does experiencing an object require less the objects itself but more just an image of it? It is much easier to immortalize an image of an object then to find an equally efficient mean to communicate space? During last decade at least architecture has been dominated by experience of an image. Images have been over flooding us in such quantities that they have become meaningless, have become trash in a studio bin and spam in you mailbox. This makes me think about the concept of
understanding media - extensions of man of Marshall McLuhan. We find ourselves in ever crazier pursue of extending our presence and every time we take a step in that direction we find ourselves even further away from fulfillment.
So space should be a multi-sensory experience as opposed to mono-sensory object. On the other hand to experience an object is advisable to touch it, smell it and sometimes for some objects to even taste them. This is something that I do very often since I was was a child. This sense of touch when experiencing objects remains especially strong for craftsmen who manufacture things with their own hands. The feeling of cutting material, assembling it, adjusting, sanding and refining has something to do with the divine creation.
They say space and objects have an intrinsic and never-ending relationship. Many questions arise. How to understand it in the daily life and practice? Sometimes it is rather easier to follow the opposite direction, namely to build up your architectural positions with regard to objects being something in opposition to space but not complementary. Maybe we are just lacking sufficient technological means to communicate space but we think we have sufficient language to talk about objects? This might be wrong when we stick to the assumption of equivalence of object and space. Maybe then experiences of an object and a space have the same principles. Maybe it is the quality of experience that should be taken into consideration. Sometimes it is simply shallow and temporal, in other times it is more enhanced through the activity of more senses?
The domination of the sense of sight in present day media is something that we should deal with. That one is too easy and longer exciting any more. Maybe we should rethink the position of Marshall McLuhan, assume that the media will never be sufficient for our dual psycho-somatic nature? Maybe finally the effort should be taken to let our whole bodies deal with more architecture, more objects and more spaces for better quality of experience and excitement?
