Sterility in Architecture. A Manifesto.

The United States is turning into a hermetically sealed, sanitized environment. Bright lights, wide hallways, tile floors. Easy access, wide doors. Sterile. More and more buildings are starting to look like hospitals. Look at newly renovated historic buildings. The insides are clean drywall, harsh overhead fluorescent lighting, tile floors. It is probably the MOST irritating thing for me to walk into a wonderful building from the early 1900s or before and be met with the same sterility of a building completed yesterday. For Ohio State people, a good example of this is Jennings Hall. This type of interior is dominating commercial and domestic design.

Another example is of newly done wood flooring/paneling. Look for seams. It is nigh impossible to find them. The surface is so perfect, so sterile. What is interesting about perfection? My room has beautiful old hardwood flooring (sadly covered up by carpet at the moment), and it isn't a sterile, smooth surface. You can feel the grain, see and feel the joints. It is authentic to its material properties. It is wood trying to be wood, not wood trying to be concrete, or glass, 0r tile. All of this deception is driving me insane. The next time I see a bastardization of authenticity with new garbage, I just might go postal. Maybe I'm a classicist, but I would rather be a classicist than someone in favor of half-baked plans of renewal.

Ok, so we're finally getting to the argument here... That argument is that I like excessive, bordering on frivolous complexity in circulation. The more unnecessary twists and turns your path takes form Point A to Point B, the better. The further the ideas and form seem from functional, the better. I like the option for people to be left to their own terms to explore. The more nooks and crannies, the more uncomfortable interstitial space, the better. The places I like the most, are the places one should like the least. Little else gets me more excited in the experience of a building than finding idiosyncratic floor layouts and complex series of rooms. The procession through several delightfully dingy spaces is infinitely better than one sterile space. Modern hallways lead directly from place to place, lit harshly from above. There are few bends in the path. For example, the donkey path city will forever have a more rich and complex urban fabric than the tabula rasa approach of a Voisin town plan. The micro of this scale produces the same effect. Layout of rooms sets the tone for exploring a building. The more spaces to explore, the more interesting (usually) it is.

The spirit of exploration is something that has always been with me. Recently, I feel this spirit has weakened in my thoughts about architecture. I am too afraid to take risks in my line of thinking. The possibility of failure is all too evident at all times. I realize, that to create truly interesting work, I will need to think in an interesting way. The return of complexity to architecture has been a long time coming, and I find it to be necessary. There is more to a space than the pure function. The interesting aspects of a building come through tireless detail. The parts contribute to a total, interesting whole. The qualities are based off of both a generative process to develop a strategy of circulating, but also with consideration to the experiential aspects. Buildings today clearly have little thought behind them in regards to the quality of a space. It is rendered in shades of gray, consistently and cleanly sheathing the good character with poor design. This needs to stop. We collectively need to regain a sense of "bad" design, and return a sense of backwards logic to architecture.