Beautifully Empty

A few years ago, a significant part of my job was preparing design proposals for prospective clients. As well as addressing the specific selection criteria, part of the art of preparing a good submission was preparing a version of the company portfolio which cast the firm in the best light, given the client’s specific requirements.

Imagery was essential to a good proposal – it could demonstrate, at a glance, how the firm had addressed similar design challenges in the past. Good photographs of past projects also gave proposals a sense of the tangible – a demonstration of ideas that had taken shape in the real world (and something that no amount of words, CAD renderings or concept sketches can really substitute for).

A common source of frustration for me was that many of our stock portfolio images depicted beautifully finished, perfectly lit, crisp, clean . . . empty spaces. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for projects where the aesthetic was a big part of the whole point (fine art exhibitions for instance). But I felt they really sold interactive spaces short – even the most interactive and engaging exhibition in the world looks sterile and passive without visitors there to breathe life into it.

There were good reasons why the images were the way they were: most of them were taken opportunistically, at the end of an install – while the ink was still drying, so to speak. Real visitors (not the people in suits and tell-tale name tags from opening night) could be days or sometimes weeks away. And it wasn’t always logistically or economically feasible to come back later to get the perfectly populated photographs in a museum that was several timezones away.

Practical issues aside though, it has since struck me that most images you see in the design or architectural press show spaces where people are conspicuously absent. At points, it borders on the spooky: deserted nightclubs, abandoned restaurants, lobbies where your only company would be the echo of your footsteps. To see what I mean, pick up an architectural magazine at random (or do a google image search under architecture magazine). I did this the other day as an experiment. Out of all the images in the feature articles (I ignored ads ,etc):50 were completely depopulated, 7 had people in them, and another 6 had what I called an ‘arty’ human presence (those long-exposure photographs where the person’s movement blurs them into a sort of semi-existence; ephemeral in relation to the permanence of the building).

Based on these examples, one could be forgiven for thinking that architects see people as a messy inconvenience, ruining their masterpieces. So when architects and designers speak amongst themselves, they airbrush out the public. This has interesting implications for the social and aesthetic role of architecture and design.

Jon Lang, writing 20 years ago*, really put his finger on something when he wrote:

Design professionals have long been rent by two opposing self-images – that of themselves as artists and that of themselves as environmental designers. . . Architects tend to think of buildings as objects and are thus concerned with object perception rather than environment perception. . . They are concerned with buildings as art rather than environments. . . Few architects would place themselves at the extreme ends of an artist-environmental designer scale, but these are two contrasting self-images, with the former being the one promoted by schools of architecture and the press. . . The problem is that few architects or schools of architectural education explicitly recognise this tension. . .

As far as I can tell, this tension has not been resolved in the intervening two decades.

Museums are an interesting case study in considering buildings as art vs. buildings as environments. New museums are often housed in ‘statement’ buildings by celebrity architects, which may or may not be all that easy to live with on a day-to-day operations front.

I should be clear – this is not intended as an anti design rant! Well-planned and executed design adds to our lives. Social research and environmental psychology have shown us that aesthetics are far more than an ‘optional extra’ in our homes, workplaces and public places. But nor is the aesthetic an end in itself: beauty in design helps serve the psychological and social needs of people. And I do wonder where people sit in the order of priorities in ‘statement’ architecture.

*Jon Lang (1991) Design Theory from an Environment and Behavior  Perspective. In Zube, EH & Moore GT (eds) Advances in Environment, Behavior and Design Volume 3. (extracts from p55; emphasis added)