Architecture Enables Lifestyle

Most people probably think that architecture is partly civil engineering and partly artistic design and beauty. How important is the subject of beauty to architecture? For the moment let's interpret 'beauty' the way that most would: a combination of shapes, colors, and textures that are somehow pleasing to the eye.

Shapes?  A rectangle is a rectangle, an arch is an arch. There are only so many building materials and most of them are flat, so you can build with only so many shapes. Even when you see a structure as radical as a geodesic dome, you have to eventually say, "So, I now know what an equilateral triangle is."

Colors? How many colors can a building have?  White, earth tones, metallic grey, rust. Anything else would look ridiculous or age in an unseemly way.

Texture? Rough or smooth.

Of course, reductionism like this is unfair. Couldn't we also say, "How many notes are in the musical scale? So when you've heard a few minutes of any music, you've heard it all?"

Or if you were sitting at an outdoor cafe in Paris in spring, and the young buckaroos were doing some serious girl-watching, would you volunteer, "Well after all, they all have the same parts. The end result is just diapers and bills-to-pay?"

OK, so I admit that beauty does exist in architecture, but unless you plan on hiring an architect and spending millions of dollars on some edifice, how important can it really be to most of us?

So then, let's dismiss (visual) beauty from our consideration of architecture, and find something else to value.

I gave a hint in the title of the last post, What is Architecture? Recall Tolstoy's book, "What is Art."  He rejects the conventional idea that art is all about beauty, and decides in favor of defining art as a work that infectiously transfers emotions from the artist to the viewer/reader/listener.

Let's do somewhat the same thing regarding architecture. Last post, a commenter started maneuvering towards the idea of architecure possessing moral beauty and expressing cultural values. This is the right direction, I think, but it would take a book to discuss it all. Let's specialize the value of architecture to the question of,  "How does it let me live?" (I am not discussing how one should live.)

In the rat race, one's life is pretty much consumed by the standard things. Even in retirement, I'm not sure that the architecture of a stick-and-brick house would affect your lifestyle all that much.

The best examples of how architecture can affect your lifestyle are:

1. Sailboats, especially during the Age of Discovery, when Europe basically took over the world.
2. Tepees of indigenous tribes in North America.
3. The wagons of the Roma, aka gypsies.
4. Wagons of the North American (European) pioneers.
5. Igloos of the esquimaux. 

Alas, these are all in the past. In the modern world, the architecture of RVs is probably the limiting case of  architecture-leading-to-lifestyle. And yet it so easy to design or buy an RV without really focusing on how it will let you live!

Despite all my years of experience in this racket, when I think about the design of a rig, my mind doesn't switch to "How will it let me live?" as rapidly as it should. Instead, it wallows in secondary issues such as motorhome versus trailer, size, weight, brand, color, style, floor plan.

I will skip the ritualistic flailing at, and spoon-feeding of, "practical"  details. Anyone who is near retirement age and has owned a house can work all that out for themselves. But they may benefit from being reminded to always put "How will I live" at the front of their mind.