This is another in my series of posts inspired by 1000 Awesome Things, the Webby Award winning blog written by Neil Pasricha. The series is my meditation on the awesome reasons why I was and continue to be attracted to the art of architecture.
Architecture stems in large part from the relationship between humans and the natural environment, in particular the need for protection from the elements. Constructing shelters in response to that need (as opposed to seeking naturally formed refuges, such as caves) prompts symbolic associations between the function of shelter and its most archetypal forms. Even with all the technology at our disposal to keep a hostile environment at bay, these archetypes retain their pancultural symbolic power today. We instinctively attribute meaning to specific building geometries and are especially responsive to those we readily associate with shelter.
The 18th century French architectural theorist Marc-Antoine Laugier explored the origins of architecture in his Essai sur l’architecture, seeking to distill its most fundamental bases. This he expressed through the concept of The Primitive Hut, utilizing naturally derived forms to outline his general principles of architecture. For Laugier, the hypothetical Primitive Hut provided a universal model for architecture and a reminder of the essential meaning of all building. While he sought to promote principles founded upon the simplicity of rustic structures, his belief in the conceptual hut as a mediator between man and nature—the beginnings of shelter as architecture—underscored his entire thesis.
The roof of a building typically provides the most visible measure of psychological shelter. As Christopher Alexander and his colleagues noted in Pattern No. 117 of their seminal work A Pattern Language, the most primitive of buildings are often little more than a roof. They assert that if a roof is hidden, if its presence cannot be felt around the building, or if it cannot be used, then people will lack a fundamental sense of shelter.
The geometries of steeply pitched or sloped roofs most effectively symbolize shelter. In regions subject to heavy precipitation or harsh winters, the warmth and embrace of sheltering roofs is literally protective. The power of sloping roof forms to imply shelter seems innate, so much so that young children invariably draw houses with sloped roofs, regardless of where they live. Conversely, people typically read flat roofs as indifferent to the environment; the exception to this interpretation being when they occur in a hospitable clime, in which case the flat roofs are ideally inhabited, either literally or figuratively (such as the roof terraces of Greek island villages or the roofscapes of Le Corbusier’s Unités d’Habitation, respectively).
Writers have effectively used the notion of shelter as a literary stand-in for themes associated with wellbeing, security, or civilization. In William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, the goal of building shelters represents an imperative for order and security, while in John Updike’s short story A Sense of Shelter, the “shelter” is the comfortable high school environment the story’s protagonist had grown very accustomed to but was about to leave. Symbolically, shelter represents our comfort-zone, a place in which we are covered, protected, and at ease.
Other aspects of shelter include its correlation with the primordial symbolism of the mother’s womb, certainly an enclosed and protected space, the first we all experience. Additionally, shelter is associated with habitation, in its most granular form a family’s house. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space, “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” So, a house is more than shelter. The built form of housing invariably is endowed with meaning beyond that of shelter alone to include symbols of family life, indicators of social organization, and status.
Profoundly, the production of shelter is a means to differentiate a place from the surrounding world, to establish with greater specificity our dwelling within the universal. Shelter sets up a relationship between us, the landscape outside, and the skies above. In a way, whether consciously or not, we regard our shelters to be a symbolic miniaturization of the universe itself.
The origins of meaning in architecture have always fascinated me. The symbolism of shelter is rooted in prehistory, dating to when the very nature of who we are as a species was taking form. The need for shelter is both primeval and eternal. Today, when it is all too easy to become distracted by the exigencies of construction, program, and budget, let’s not risk forgetting architecture’s AWSOME capacity to communicate through the meaningful use of symbolic forms.
Next Architecture is Awesome: #23 Walls
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