Analysis of 'Places of the Soul'...
Page 56: 'Five-year-olds need a more protective environment, opportunity to live actively in a world of imagination and imitation. One room would be more upright, firmer in its forms and spaces, more outward-looking. The other would be warmer in colour, softer, lower, snugger in space and form. For the kindergarten I am building at present I have circular rooms with their singular social focus but freed from their deterministic geometry by corner play-alcoves at various levels and large windows as well as tiny low deep-set ones with protection offered by a world of trees'.
Page 56: 'Different environments are appropriate to different social groups ... One group needs space, peace, light, air, long views and tend to indulge themselves in private realms - suburbia; the other needs cosiness, enclosure, protection, and have tended to build solid houses with small windows'.
Page 56: 'old Welsh farms where the farmers have become prosperous and built new extensions for spacious kitchens - for the kitchen is the room everyone lives in - but in the modern, sterile style. The house seems empty, unfriendly: the family complain that it feels cold, though of course it now has central heating. The lack of warmth is not because the temperature is too low. It is not because the colour of the walls is too cool a white, though this is part of it. It is because the house has lost its heart. It has lost its soul warmth and now has inappropriate qualities.
Page 56: 'This failure to nourish the soul is experienced also as a failure to provide the right physical environment, even though the instruments say otherwise. The qualities of environment are more important than their quantity.'
[CONVERSATION OR CONFLICT?]
Page 57: 'We notice the warmth when we come into a warm room from the cold, when we move closer to the fire ... The wrong sort of warmth of air quality is harmful whether we notice it or not, but qualities, however appropriate, are to bring joy and refreshment to the soul, we need variety - not endlessly the exact same temperature, lighting level, the same view, the same sort of shapes, space, or movement through space. once there is variety we become aware of how one experience is set against another. We become aware of meetings. Mostly it is in the visual sphere that we notice meetings. Most of these are meeting edges, for white the being of something may live in its centre - say a field of colour - the meetings occur where its meets another colour.'
Page 58: 'If architecture is to provide harmonious surroundings in which people can feel alive, at ease and peaceful enough to feel themselves, it needs to build out the conversational principle.'
Page 58: 'A lot of time in architectural design is given to creating shapes ... There are also many other shapes which do exist as drawn but which we don't see because we are unable to stand and see everything all at once ... Shape, whether we consciously look at it or not, has effects upon us, but how that shape is edged also has a great effect.
Page 59: 'Subtle modifications to shape to ease the movement of the eye (and hand) from one line to another make a tremendous difference to how we respond to things. A table with knife-sharp edges is not as nice to sit at as one where the edges are rounded'.
IMAGE ON PAGE 58 DESC:
' Built in the 1950s this room was a severe and steroid rectanguloid. Minor shaping of the ceiling, hand-finished texture on the walls and the inerplay of light from different windows make all the difference. This minimal shaping makes the room habitable. The mood however, is created by the light, the colour and the reflected colour-light. Space, shape, light and colour all weave in conversation with each other to create one atmospheric whole. '
DIAGRAM ON PAGE 59
Page 59 / 60: 'For practical reasons, especially construction and storage, we need the straight line and its product - rectangular forms. But these are not forms which we can find anywhere in the human body, in human movement, human activity, nor anywhere in nature. Rectangular forms are forms that suit machines and mechanistic thinking.'
IMAGE ON PAGE 60 DESC:
' However striking, sculptural or imposing, architecture like this is the product of the rational but arid intellect, not the heart, for it seeks powerful images at the price of more delicate feelings. Such buildings do not create places to feel good in, nor indeed, with hand, eye or heart, to feel at all. Nothing can live in a hard, rectangular, mineral world without artifical support - without vehicles, lifts, air-conditioning, TV ... consumerist entertainment it would be uninhabitable ... Places resulting from this approach to architecture are for machines, not for the human soul. '
Page 60: 'If I use a computer to draw a curve that I have swept with a light-pencil it can of course do it - but the nature of the two curves could not be more different (DIAGRAM ON PAGE 59) ... If I draw a curve, it has bodily movement built into it; the most alive and firmest curves are drawn from the toes, not with just the fingertips. To display this, the computer reduces my uninterrupted, flowing, evolving, living gesture into a lifeless binary code.'
Page 60: 'Things that are alive never fit exactly in any hard-edged category ... Nothing can live in such places if it were not artifically sustained to an immense degree.'
Page 61: 'Rooms made up of sharp planed edges are harsh, those of responsive knife-shaved edges much more life-filled and welcoming.'
IMAGE ON PAGE 62 DESC:
' Conflicting lines, planes and shapes can be brought into conversation, even song, with each other. '
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(Day, C., 1990. Places of the Soul - Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art. The Aquarian Press.)