QUALITATIVE OPENNESS:

Architecture is a practice commonly thought of as drawing floor plans and elevations for buildings. This is unkind. Not to architects but to our collective understanding of the built environment.

A more useful understanding would be that architecture is concerned with the careful planning of the relative locations of things in space; of objects, materials, openings, and so on, and their respective proportions and proximities. This is more accurate. After all, walls, ceilings, floors, doors, and windows are the material facts of any building and are therefore the components used to create them.

But this view of materials and objects as ends in themselves is also limiting. One may feel a sneaking suspicion that these elements are simply tools for shaping another, more primary goal.

The usefulness of walls, floors, and ceilings—of the solid-bits of architecture—is in their ability shape a certain volume of space. It is, in fact, not the surfaces, but the voided atmosphere left between the surfaces that we use as we inhabit. So the primary tool of architecture is, paradoxically, emptiness. Architecture, as a practice, is then simply the shaping of specific instances of this emptiness.

Yet, this emptiness is not void of content. It is not simply negative, left-over nothingness. To the contrary, it is the place in which light and shadow, sound and silence, pleasures and sensations manifest themselves to our senses. Space is animate. It is saturated by the shifting contents of our experience of the world around us.

It is this qualitative openness that architecture is capable of initiating. This view of architecture allows for the possibility of shaping and enhancing the human experience in and through the built environment. Seen this way, buildings and gardens and other constructed spaces are not merely containers for activity but are active participants in shaping how we feel, move, and interact. We may choose then to see architecture as an open invitation to a relationship between our bodies, our selves, and that which is near to us.