Architecture is Awesome #23: Walls

“Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.” Louis Kahn.

(Photo of the National Parliament House of Bangladesh by Rossi101 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

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. 

Walls keep us safe from dangers or threats and help shelter us from the elements. Along with the roof, walls give form to buildings. They enclose and make rooms useful. They secure our privacy and shape our behavior. Since ancient times, walls have kept out others we fear or find undesirable (examples of such barriers include the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall in the UK, and the former guy’s notorious southern border wall), or have enforced control within (for example, inside the perimeter of a penitentiary or between the separated parts of Cold War-era Berlin). The idea and realization of walls can be architectural, functional, historical, and political.

Though primarily intended to keep the exterior at bay, walls can draw exterior space in or interior space out.

Some walls, being load-bearing, support the roof and any floors above the outside grade. Many of these walls are massive, both literally in the sense of the materials from which they are built and as we perceive them (as they may be visually imposing and solid). Others rely on framing—posts, beams, studs, and the like—to transfer loads to the foundation. Framed walls permit large openings, such as porticos, doors, or windows. Framed walls can be mutable; think of the sliding paper shoji screens of traditional sukiya-zukuri style Japanese houses. Twentieth-century technology permitted walls entirely of glass—transparent, translucent, or mirrored—the apotheosis of a dematerialized, incorporeal architecture envisioned by the Modernists.

John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes, University of Oregon (my photo)

You can be on one side or the other of a wall. You can rest against or move alongside it, experience its aural and haptic properties, and appreciate its design and detailing. If a door is available, you can pass through a wall, its presence marking a transition between two states of being. In existential terms, that moment is of expressive importance, which is why architects have often lavished so much attention to the matter of walls and the openings in them. 

Wall House #2

(Photo by Wenkbrauwalbatros, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)\

John Hejduk (1929-2000) is one architect who regarded the wall as the original architectural device, one that figured prominently is his poetic distillation of architecture’s first principles. “The wall is a neutral condition,” he said. “It is the greatest moment of repose, and at the same time the greatest tension. It is a moment of passage. The wall heightens that sense of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of it being just a momentary condition . . . what I call the moment of the present." Hejduk’s design for Wall House #2, built posthumously in Groningen, the Netherlands, is an essay on the nature of the wall. In this design, the two-dimensional plane at once both divides—because one must pass through it on leaving or entering a room—and unifies the disparate functional spaces.

West façade of St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice (photo by Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Walls are backdrops in front of which we play out our daily lives. They are canvases, desirous for embellishment. The walls inside our homes collect photos, paintings, or posters that remind us of fond memories and the people we know and knew. At the scale of the city, the architectonics of prominent walls—their breadth, height, materiality, detailing, the pattern of openings, and the occasional murals rendered upon them—considerably impact our perception of the places in which they occur. They line the streets and shape the outdoor rooms that comprise our shared public realm. 

Walls are fundamental components of architecture, with correlations between their form and meaning. On the one hand, their construction must follow sets of rules (to ensure they perform as intended). On the other, we “read” walls because we are conditioned to look for how their constituent parts combine and interact to produce meaningful totalities. Accordingly, there is so much about their design and construction that is essential to the art and science of architecture. Walls are vital and AWESOME expressions of how we build and relate to the world around us. 

Next Architecture is Awesome: #24 The Act of Building