We do more than throw leaves and water on fire to make tea. We use a vessel for both the leaves and the water—a bag and a pot—membranes that hold them in place, transmit the aroma and conduct the heat. Our planet is a vessel. Water (oceans) and fire (the sun) sustain life on it between the membranes of its crust (earth) and its atmosphere (air). Fruits and nuts come with a peel, rind, husk or shell. No animal lives as a tangle of bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments and organs without a pelt of skin, fur, feathers and/or scales that binds them. Our bodies are sheathed in skin and when we leave the house, we do so enclothed.
Within the world of animate beings, our bodies are unique. We, more than any avian, marine or mammal being, have a front and a back. We are two dimensional. Only we stand up right and when we do, our eyes face forward. We have a face and unlike all other animals it is primarily flat (no beak or snout). You can tell a lot about us, although not everything from the looks on our faces. Our faces are a membrane that both conceals and yields our thoughts and feelings, what is going on inside. Our faces provide the expressive boundary across which we variously engage the world.
Variously because we present, behave and speak differently in different situations, although with increasingly less discrimination. We everywhere hear of the confounding of our public and private lives, the boundary so dissolved we can no longer distinguish them. We witness the degradation of our social discourse, the devolution of our speech, dress and social grace. We eat our meals in our cars and on the street where we walk in our sweats, slumped over our phones, our heads down, our underwear on display. We live as if we are overwhelmed by the company of others, seemingly no longer able to face the world or each other.
Our streets are a gallery of private lives laid bare. Soup cans and cereal boxes, tubes of toothpaste and sticks of deodorant stack on shelves backed up to storefronts. Office buildings display the undersides of tables and desks, trash cans and files piled on the floor. Parking structures loom over sidewalks like bombed out bunkers, car hoods and bumpers on view. Apartment buildings are pock marked with projecting balconies that go unoccupied except for bicycles, barbecue grills, dead plants and wet mops.
In the mid-20thcentury, we got buildings in the style of “good design,” stacks of columns and piers, exposed floors and glass walls capped by a roof, unmasked and in plain sight-- no frills just “honesty.” Today (because we got bored with “good design”) our best buildings crawl, crouch, slouch and lurch like so many animals while the worst lean on stints and prosthetics like wounded soldiers - all broken bones and torn up skin. Our best architecture has for over a century displayed at first indifference and then disdain for presenting a face with which to negotiate the world. Now, we spurn buildings altogether. We see them as a necessary and ugly evil with which to protect us from the elements and every new building as one more step toward the degradation of our environment.
None of this was inevitable and instead self- inflicted with a self-fulfilling outcome. When we lost the appreciation for a building’s enclosure as a means with which to discretely present its private self in a public setting, to simultaneously conceal and reveal, to engage in civil social discourse, we lost the desire and the skill to engage in one of our discipline’s most enduring inventions (or was it a discovery?) – the façade. The façade had been around in most of the world and the west for a while (Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have them) but the art of the façade as we mostly know it reached its pinnacle in Italy in the 16th century then disappeared in 1945.
All buildings are necessarily enclosed but a socially engaged building has a façade. If we want (as we do) to practice an architecture that is engaged in civil society, then we have no choice (we believe) other than to re-engage (with whatever means are now at our disposal) in the art of the façade. There are no rules in art, just experience and what works; and, what works in our experience is a membrane that is mostly opaque (2 parts solid, 1 part void), vertical and two-dimensional (flat), articulated (with relief and/or ornament), believably expressive of what lies behind it but not excessively so, conscious of and in relationship with what lies in front of it. In other words, upright and face forward.