This blog is dedicated to the celebration of architecture as a source of delight. It was born from a recent class I taught on Environmental Science in architecture in which I tried to impress upon the class that there is a realm in architecture that is shared by both the architect and the client/user. Within the architectural circle, we call this the phenomenon of place, where a particular location takes on a personal identity and we relate to it uniquely.
Much has been written about the meaning of place in architecture, and much of it is difficult to understand and seems vague. In this blog, I propose that we approach this from the perspective of delight. Good design, and good architecture then, to me, are designs that give us delight.
Delight is something that we can immediately appreciate, even though it may seem difficult to define precisely. This is not a problem for me since most words in common use have that ambiguity. In any case, I do not intend to make it into an academic, pseudo-scientific term that we quarrel over. Rather, I prefer to explore what it is that gives us delight. And hopefully, by sharing that, we can relocate architecture where it belongs - in the front and centre of who we are and how we live.
I want to position the notion of delight as part of our understanding of stress, in particular, distress. Hans Selye, in one of his later books on stress, Stress without Distress, discussed the concept of eustress, which he defined as positive stress. The research that followed around this concept helped define what we now call positive psychology. The word itself, eustress, is not as well known as distress and it does not carry the widespread familiarity that distress currently has. Indeed, stress itself is currently synonymous with distress. Since stress is part and parcel of everyday life, this has made life itself distressful. After all, as observed by Selye, life is, by its very nature, stressful. However, as Selye as well as many psychologists today will tell you, life need not be distressful. Rather than saying that life can be eustressful, I'd rather say that life can be delightful. Hence, my little alteration to Selye's lovely chart.
Two other authors have been influential in helping me develop this idea of delight in architecture. The first is Lisa Heschong's book on Thermal Delight in Architecture. Written originally as a Master's thesis at MIT, the bold argument that architecture brings delight and that we seek both the experience of heat and cold, beyond the limits of thermal comfort, resonated with many architectural students and practitioners. Heschong has gone on to work on daylight design, performance metrics and visual comfort. But the idea that architecture does not simply provide comfortable spaces for living but engenders delight resonated with me over the years. The second author is Sir Henry Wotton, an English politician who though not an architect himself, transposed Vitruvius' de Architectura into the English context. Vitruvius' three pillars of architecture, Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas became firmness, commodity and delight in Wotton's book. To be honest, delight in Wotton's (and Vitruvius') mind had to do with visual beauty and Venustas is more often translated as Beauty rather than Delight.
Beauty has sadly been appropriated by academia and made into something very elusive and perhaps even undesirable. It has been idealized to the point where we disfigure our bodies and abuse ourselves in an effort to be beautiful, and diminished to the point where what is beautiful is whatever we want it to be. Delight does not carry any of that baggage. And it is precisely for this reason that I hope we shall never have to define what is delight and quarrel over it. The notion of delight is not so imposing as to offend anyone else if it is not shared. And it is not so intense as to overwhelm and negate other concerns and priorities. So far, thankfully, it has not been appropriated by academia into a word that we need to define. I hope to keep it that way, so that we can share our joy and delight in good architecture without making it a burden to those whose job it is to deliver it.
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