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I read a fascinating post today on Strangeharvest about surfaces and how modern design has all but obliterated texture from our architectural vocabulary. I think that a similarity can be drawn to the monotony of the suburb. We have tried to scrub from view the differences between us. It’s as though we view ourselves as clones us and our neighbors all with the same needs, same desires and even same sensibilities. We bought hook line and sinker someones definition of a dream and ended up a texture-less society.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jamie R // Sep 16, 2008 at 10:21 am
I am soaking it all in. Urban spaces are full of wonderful texture.
2 dustin // Sep 16, 2008 at 11:54 am
It’s funny how many of us in the design world gravitate towards, gritty, raw , paint-chipped brick, concrete and heavy timber structures. But yet we tend to not incorporate these elements in to newer construction. That’s why I think it’s so important to preserve our historic buildings and breathe new life into them, rather than demo them. I recently toured the Globe Mills project, what an incredible transformation. Adaptive reuse, I believe is the key in our older neighborhoods. Ron Vrilakas is doing a great job promoting these principles as is the Globe Mills Architectand and current preseident of the AIACV, Michael Malinowski of Applied Architecture Inc. By the way, I love this new features. It’s like writing for my own blog. Could use a spell check feature though : )
3 wburg // Sep 18, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Texture is something so important to the look of older buildings, and so absent from modern ones! In some ways the stark lack of texture of buildings from the Art Deco period must have seemed like a relief, but the pendulum swung far too far in the other direction…there seems to be a trend to add more architectural detail and visual interest to new buildings, but the texture of materials is still flat, it’s all about planar spaces rather than things you want to go put your hands on.
Texture draws the eye deeper into the surface and holds the attention past the point where planar surfaces get boring.
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