Perhaps if I had thought about the title a little more, I
might have been more reluctant to buy this book. I bought it for the ravishing
photographs. Who could resist an image of a pathway, with random stones forming
it, and a tree forming a canopy over the path? Yes, architecture should create
magic spaces! And yes, let's have a book that tells us how to work this magic!
But when I started reading Christopher Day's book, I realised it is full of
contradictions. The biggest contradiction is that the book’s message is so
good, but its details are so wrong. At a macro level, the book argues for the
emotional effects of architecture, and of course the author is correct. At a
micro level, Mr Day is prey to the most unlikely and uncorroborated fads, so
much so that I am embarrassed for him to reveal some of the unsubstantiated
statements he makes. Where he makes claims, he is often derivative (the Ruskinian idea that the craftsman's involvement in the work gives the building soul, although there is no credit for Ruskin in the index). Not only
that, he is wildly inconsistent, as I will show below.
In principle these
details should eliminate his entire case, but he is redeemed by the overall
case, which is a good one, and by some of the photos, at least.
For examples of unsubstantiated claims, try chapter two, which
contains a lot about colour. The emotional effects of colour are described as
if absolute, and even at times given a source that provides a spurious
credibility, almost a parody of the academic citation:
Blue is calming, peaceful. Green
is a colour of balance: in Steiner schools, green is the balance colour for
classrooms at the midpoint of childhood.
Teenagers need an environment
that … internalizes the outer activity of earlier childhood … for this the
appropriate colour lies in the cooler blue-green, blue-grey range.
Restaurateurs know that warm
tints, oranges and reds, stimulate appetite: blues do the reverse [source: National Geographic magazine]
I’d like to know if the teenagers whose rooms were to be
blue-green and blue-grey were consulted over this choice.
He then goes on to consider shapes, and in a similar way, he
extends a subjective view to a crass doctrine. After describing the curve of a
mother’s breast, he infers that we like curves in childhood, and then
continues:
As adults, we don’t cry in
planar surroundings, nor gurgle in curved ones, but such echoes remain: softly
curved – welcoming; flat and hard – unfriendly (but so normal, we don’t notice
it).
This last statement is accompanied by a child-like drawing
equating a sharp line in a building with a man pointing a gun, as if we didn't
get the message from the text alone.
What is all this? A mishmash of opinions invalidating a very
welcome plea to make use of some of the best features of much vernacular architecture - its irregularity, its human scale, its
unexpected spaces and use of light. Why mix all this up together? Someone
should extract the magic from this book and present it unencumbered by assertions
stated as facts. And drawings of men with guns.
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