Architecture Needs Urban Exploration

One day, when I was about 4 years old and living with my grandmother, I discovered the basement.  Steep, narrow, stairs wound down into a vast, black space.  Negotiating each stair required increasing bravery, the dark, much more.  Past an antique roll top desk and a disused coal bin that could have been a dungeon, a small shaft of dusty light fell from one of the few windows.  Just visible beyond was a braced trunk which, to my four year old eyes, looked exactly like a pirate’s treasure chest.  It even had a large and ornate padlock which came open with a gentle pull.  Within was a priceless treasure:  my uncle’s Army Air Force officer’s uniform from World War II replete with insignia.  I wore the Eisenhower jacket  with the sleeves rolled up and the service cap stuffed with newspaper for the remainder of the summer.

I mention it because it suggests something fundamental about being human.  I would go much further than T. S. Eliot: we are all explorers, from the beginning to the end.  In Autumn of last year I came across and read Bradley Garret’s “Explore Everything:  Place-Hacking the City.”  Garret’s chronicle of his and the London Consolidation Crew’s transgressive urban exploration of sites as dramatic and varied as the London Shard while under construction to all the disused London Tube stations to the Edinburgh Forth Railway Bridge can be read as a great adventure memoir, a sub-culture anthropological study, even as a kind of sub-culture tragedy suffused with a melancholy born of the futility of a brave group of misfits pursuing dangerous physical exploration to overcome social exclusion.  The photographs are phenomenal.

I was walking across Blackfriars Bridge and despairing of London’s skyline evolution one morning a few weeks ago when it occurred to me that the problem is that architects are being directed or are even choosing to design to the wrong values.  Height and presence alone, are finally static and boring.  Even complex curvilinear shapes, the creation of which I spent 20 years contributing to the mathematics thereof, are no better.  For some reason I’m reminded of Patton’s statement about the obsolescence of fixed-fortifications.  That’s part of the reason that Garrett’s exploration of the unfinished Shard is compelling whilst a visit to its observation levels now is more than anti-climactic.  In contrast, consider the walk to the top of St. Paul’s dome or even a lazy ride on the Eye.

Especially in a city with the history of London, but any place really, architects need to design buildings that make people want to explore them.  Structure and shape must dynamically reveal both mystery and meaning.  I doubt Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren and the other great architects of the 17^th and 18^th century had that in mind.  Certainly James of St. George was thinking of other things when he designed the superlative Welsh Edwardian castles.  But that is their effect.  We love visiting those castles, particularly on a day with changeable weather when there are few or no other visitors because they make us into explorers.  St. Paul’s, indeed all the great English cathedrals do that in part because of the tension between their dual role of historical commemoration and religious celebration.  Tension, geometric or cultural is essential.  We are dramatic creatures.  Fencing tonight.