The Painted Room

Space is a continuity of time. Humans capture it and define it for a while—and for those brief moments in the millennia they achieve a place for the theater of their lives. This concept is presented in the quietly beautiful illustrated novel, Here, by Richard McGuire. With it, he portrays the passages of a specific acre of geography in New Jersey with snapshots back and forth between the ages, from the primordial swamps before dinosaurs to a virtual archeological museum thousands of years in our future. Animals roam, forests are cleared, houses are built, wallpaper is changed, people love and people die, nature evolves and conquers—all in the inevitable path of time. For McGuire, everywhere has the potential for being ‘place’.

Recognizing the temporal boundaries of their work, architects seek to define spaces that impart a special status of ‘place’ where important or even mundane human activities are ennobled over time and use. This is applicable in private occupancies, such as homes that sanctify the family. At a larger scale, there are public occupancies where diverse people cross paths in common, honoring the civic and cultural institutions that reflect a healthy society. When architects display artistic intentions for these spaces, they convey to all who wish to recognize that public life is worthy of expression and interpretation for the enrichment of all.

Rooms belong to the passage of the human experience involving memorable events, public and private.

Being relational to place and to the events of time, rooms belong to a context. The former is of great importance to the architect, as a room is always experienced within a sequence of other spaces, as in a campus or a city of any epoch—or it is experienced in other environments, such as a meadow or a forest. Consider the remarkable Nolli Plan (1748) wherein open streets and piazza are combined in the drawing with the significant interior spaces of the city, primarily church sanctuaries and loggias—to illustrate the comprehensive spatial diagram of Rome. It seems to transport the viewer into the city’s scale and organic character, thus offering an imaginary experience of being there. Perhaps it is even a lesson in the simultaneity of urbanism.

Within cities, the public spaces and streets are formed by the volumes and surfaces of buildings, giving each urban environment its unique character of place. However, this brief essay is concerned mostly with interior surfaces, since they are integral with building design, they are a marker in our understanding of built history, and they are an intimate aspect of our personal memories. At risk of channeling Rasmussen’s classic primer Experiencing Architecture, this leads us to a discussion of the position and character of planes—walls, ceilings, floors—be they organic or material.

Because it is essentially spatial, a room is experienced as a three-dimensional composition of planes, often, but not always, orthogonal ones. By using our facility for composition, architects can emphasize space for unity or dis-assemble it for dynamism and ambiguity. This is done with the surfaces themselves, which have the characteristics of materiality, texture, color, shape, reflectivity, opacity, transparency, and so on. Sometimes there are significant elements or objects in a room that contribute to the composition through consistency or contrast—by subdividing the space to achieve new relationships. In antiquity, the surfaces were often the actual material structure of the building, like the massive limestone walls of a gothic church or the timber trusses of a great hall. These examples are treasured as authentic (even as they were often decorated and painted, like the Greek temples apparently were). This concept is largely unavailable to us today. In most cases the surfaces we experience are an independent layer—offering the architect an infinite set of choices and combinations to compose with.

Rooms belong to the passage of the human experience involving memorable events, public and private. Often, architects shape rooms for specific purposes—to honor their usefulness in reflecting cultural ideas or civic protocols, such as in a sanctuary, a theater, or a courtroom. We shape the experience of the room with scale and light, and we prioritize its use with portals, axes, and hierarchy—all in a composition of plastic space to evoke its presence. However, we recognize that many significant moments don’t conveniently happen in those kinds of spaces and that meaningful potential resides in everyday spaces too. Humans find places to suit their circumstances, such as in the roots of the French Revolution as painted by David in The Tennis Court Oath wherein the wind billowing the high curtains portends the oncoming national drama. Or, humans conduct their private lives under soft light in the unprepossessing corners of the room in your favorite Vermeer.

In good architecture, space is not that which is ‘left over’ after the walls and ceilings have been put on a plan to accommodate some functional imperatives. Instead, space is intentionally manipulated by the architect, defined with ambiguity or specificity, with plasticity or formality, with many scales, with permeability—to create the potential for a multitude of different perceptions. Having transparency between interior and exterior, a room can be defined by walls or a line of trees in the distance. These are some among many of the foundational attributes of a room, including the quality and character of its surfaces, that affect how people feel in it and how they use it. Memorable rooms are those that synthesize these conditions in layers of presence for us to absorb in time.

I’d like to take a discursive detour to discuss the idea of ‘simultaneity’ in the context of rooms. In the present mediated world that envelopes us, simultaneity can take the form of being in physical space while also being in the internet or on a zoom call. However, I will stick with the potential of physical space itself as offering the dynamic of being, or seeming to be, in more than one place at a time. In architectural history, we see this expressed, for example, in the overlapping spaces of Borromini’s baroque sanctuaries or of Van der Rohe’s famous pavilion. In rooms designed for performance (several illustrated in this album), there is a relationship between the audience being in one room while the story being told is in an adjacent room connected by a proscenium—both brought together in experience when the lights go out. Even so, any room thoughtfully designed can delight its occupants with varied aspects of space, light, sound, and vista to connect them in multiple dimensions.

Composition in architecture is its own layer of information, expressing what is visually and experientially important. It is scalable, from simple to complex considerations depending upon the importance of the space. And it is most satisfying when it is derived authentically—that is, it reflects larger order(s) within the plan or elevation or section rather than being randomly applied to achieve effect. This is the architect’s talent of synthesis. Humans are creatures who are drawn to patterns and rhythms, looking to comprehend the structure of things, beginning with the sun and stars in the sky. I don’t think it is too grand a proposition to consider that architects can express that deep human curiosity by utilizing all elements of architecture in an array of thoughtful composition within and between spaces. Invoking here the many buildings of Le Corbusier, the modern master of composition and color, provides a segue into making an association between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional architecture.

The ‘painterly’ connection to this narrative is one of choosing content, color, and texture, among other tools, for compositional character. For both artist and architect this involves being simultaneously in parallel with the purely functional in their working process. As a critical layer of intent, composition can be emphasized or nuanced—even stretched to the point of nihilism (or ultimately contextual?) with Malevich’s White on White. Perhaps a more comfortable reference can be seen in Sargent’s most adventuresome portraits, such as Mrs. Karl Meyer and Her Children. The subjects’ heads, hands and fashion are objects for composition, not unlike apples and vases in still-life. The likeness (what was expected by the client and paid handsomely for) is brilliantly secondary to the art—wherein the primary narrative is a parallel and intersecting compositional structure. The best of his clients understood and sought that complexity, and it is a lesson (albeit difficult) for architects to ask that same expectation and trust of their significant clients.

Happily, architects have inanimate three-dimensional objects and material surfaces on their palette. We have the added layer of craft with which to express tectonics and human ingenuity—with objects made by other hands and joined in a comprehensive choir of joyous physicality. The portfolio of rooms that you saw in this album were created by MGA Partners to achieve the functional precision for the daily usefulness that makes them credible—in parallel with an artistic intent that makes them present and memorable—linking us to the people who come upon them through time.