Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [54]
What we experience when we encounter buildings is felt spontaneously, but it is filtered through the culture that we have acquired on our journey to that encounter, and we will have acquired some of that culture deliberately, some of it by chance. The parts that we acquire by chance will be the things that we pick up from the culture that surrounds us, and so will be the result of accidents of birth, and the circles in which we move. This is the culture in which most of us feel most at home most of the time, and in which we live our everyday lives. The most important aspect of the things we encounter in this way is their familiarity. There is room for a little novelty now and again, so that we are not faced with unrelieved tedium, but the familiarity of our surroundings is as reassuring as the predictable attitudes of our friends. We start to worry if someone we think we know well starts to behave in unexpected ways.
Educated tastes
Another part of our culture is that which we have deliberately set out to acquire, in one way or another. It is clear that we can deliberately educate our tastes. It is less clear why we would choose to do so, as at the outset the effort outweighs the immediate pleasures. We must have a conviction that something good will come of the effort that we put into these things. With music for example it is rare to find a piece that sounds best at its first hearing, and if it sounds worse as we get to know it then we are bound to think that it is bad music. We need to familiarize ourselves with the music’s sound-world, so that we have a sense of what sound sequences are possible, and then we can listen in a way where we can be happy with our immediate responses, so that one can be prepared for listening to a piece by Mozart by knowing other compositions by him; but familiarity with Mozart’s polished elegance would not be enough preparation to be able to enjoy one’s first hearing of a piece by Bartok, with complex astringent harmonies and the lively irregular rhythms of Hungarian folk dances. It is only when one is more familiar with his sound-world that the music comes to have the power to move. Similarly with architecture there are buildings that follow recognizable patterns – the most pervasive across the development of Western civilization being the varieties of classicism. There are also regional traditions, and the recent international tradition of modernism and its variants which can turn into individual personal traditions, as in the case of Frank Gehry and other architects who design ‘signature’ buildings around the world, where part of a building’s prestige comes from the fact that it is the work of an identifiable designer, and can be recognized by people who take an interest in contemporary architecture. A city’s prestige can grow by collecting such buildings, which show that it has a place in the cosmopolitan world. We can get to know our local buildings by chance, and especially if we use them regularly we can form strong views about them, responding to whether they help us or frustrate us as we try to go about our lives. Without particularly thinking about it, we are probably quietly pleased that these buildings continue to be there, acting as reference points against which to plot our progress through a familiar city. It would be possible for the buildings in question to be quite ordinary, or if my journey to work were to take me through