Spaces of Guilt and Innocence

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

I was in London earlier this month, primarily for another year of external exams at the Bartlett School of Architecture. This consists for the most part in meeting with a large group of students from different design units across the school for one-on-one presentations of their work; much of that work was incredibly interesting and worth sharing here.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

This first project is a design for a new London Law Court, by Matthew Turner for Unit 12. The class, taught by Jonathan Hill, Elizabeth Dow, and Matthew Butcher, looked at what it called “the public private house,” with a focus on civic institutions and their relationship to the larger city.

In this case, that institution is a court of law.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

The entire project is built around a set of stark spatial polarities set up between public and private, accuser and accused, guilty and innocent.

Circulation—the actual path a visitor might take to pass from one room to another, or from one part of the facility to the next, or even what can or cannot be seen from specific standpoints, such as the witness box or the judge’s robing chambers—is thus the building’s major organizing principle.

It is all about sequence, connection, and adjacency.

[Images: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

Even better, the project is a rigorous exploration of brick, a hugely overlooked material, including micro-studies of structural bricklaying patterns and surface effects.

[Image: Brick patterns from “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

Turner explained that different surface treatments show up throughout the building almost as a kind of signage or way-finding tool, such that particular patterns come to signify types of interior spaces throughout the complex—a public waiting area, for example, or spaces for the accused.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

These pattern-studies are rendered in a style that makes them deeply reminiscent of Auguste Choisy.

[Images: Brick patterns from “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

Turner really went for it with the axonometry, cutting gorgeous sections through sites of extreme structural complexity that reveal slices of the interior that seem more like Cubist abstractions than actual building plans.

Yet, as his thesis voluminously demonstrates, all of the spaces nonetheless maintain both architectural and narrative coherence.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

The passage of light, as can be seen in this next image, is also given symbolic or explanatory weight. As Turner writes, “Distances are compressed and spaces seem to step through each other. Spaces are attenuated, echoed and re-echoed before their sources are experienced. Light in the building does not signify divine truth and justice but instead its shadows and effects are hard to define.”

As they day progresses, the interior is like a clock, and “shadows become spaces within themselves.”

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

The thesis is immensely detailed, and these selections are barely sufficient as an introduction to Turner’s work. As a study of how architecture itself—that is, the careful and deliberate sequencing of spatial experience—can be used to instill narrative sensations of guilt, resolution, privacy, institutional respect, and so much more, it was really commendable.

[Image: From “The New London Law Court” by Matthew Turner, Bartlett School of Architecture, Unit 12].

I’ll hope to post a few more projects from the Bartlett over the next couple of days.

The Neurological Side-Effects of 3D

[Image: Auguste Choisy].

France is considering a ban on stereoscopic viewing equipment—i.e. 3D films and game environments—for children, due to “the possible [negative] effect of 3D viewing on the developing visual system.”

As a new paper suggests, the use of these representational technologies is “not recommended for chidren under the age of six” and only “in moderation for those under the age of 13.”

There is very little evidence to back up the ban, however. As Martin Banks, a professor of vision science at UC Berkeley, points out in a short piece for New Scientist, “there is no published research, new or old, showing evidence of adverse effects from watching 3D content other than the short-term discomfort that can be experienced by children and adults alike. Despite several years of people viewing 3D content, there are no reports of long-term adverse effects at any age. On that basis alone, it seems rash to recommend these age-related bans and restrictions.”

Nonetheless, he adds, there is be a slight possibility that 3D technologies could have undesirable neuro-physical effects on infants:

The human visual system changes significantly during infancy, particularly the brain circuits that are intimately involved in perceiving the enhanced depth associated with 3D viewing technology. Development of this system slows during early childhood, but it is still changing in subtle ways into adolescence. What’s more, the visual experience an infant or young child receives affects the development of binocular circuits. These observations mean that there should be careful monitoring of how the new technology affects young children.

But not necessarily an outright ban.

In other words, overly early—or quantitatively excessive—exposure to artificially 3-dimensional objects and environments could be limiting the development of retinal strength and neural circuitry in infants. But no one is actually sure.

What’s interesting about this for me—and what simultaneously inspires a skeptical reaction to the supposed risks involved—is that we are already surrounded by immersive and complexly 3-dimensional spatial environments, built landscapes often complicated by radically diverse and confusing focal lengths. We just call it architecture.

Should the experience of disorienting works of architecture be limited for children under a certain age?

[Image: Another great image by Auguste Choisy].

It’s not hard to imagine taking this proposed ban to its logical conclusion, claiming that certain 3-dimensionally challenging works of architectural space should not be experienced by children younger than a certain age.

Taking a cue from roller coasters and other amusement park rides considered unsuitable for people with heart conditions, buildings might come with warning signs: Children under the age of six are not neurologically equipped to experience the following sequence of rooms. Parents are advised to prevent their entry.

It’s fascinating to think that, due to the potential neurological effects of the built environment, whole styles of architecture might have to be reserved for older visitors, like an X-rated film. You’re not old enough yet, the guard says patronizingly, worried that certain aspects of the building will literally blow your mind.

Think of it as a Schedule 1 controlled space.

[Image: From the Circle of Francesco Galli Bibiena, “A Capriccio of an Elaborately Decorated Palace Interior with Figures Banqueting, The Cornices Showing Scenes from Mythology,” courtest of Sotheby’s].

Or maybe this means that architecture could be turned into something like a new training regimen, as if you must graduate up a level before you are able to handle specific architectural combinations, like conflicting lines of perspective, unreal implications of depth, disorienting shadowplay, delayed echoes, anamorphic reflections, and other psychologically destabilizing spatial experiences.

Like some weird coming-of-age ceremony developed by a Baroque secret society overly influenced by science fiction, interested mentors watch every second as you and other trainees react to a specific sequence of architectural spaces, waiting to see which room—which hallway, which courtyard, which architectural detail—makes you crack.

Gifted with a finely honed sense of balance, however, you progress through them all—only to learn at the end that there are four further buildings, structures designed and assembled in complete secrecy, that only fifteen people on earth have ever experienced. Of those fifteen, three suffered attacks of amnesia within a year.

Those buildings’ locations are never divulged and you are never told what to prepare for inside of them—what it is about their rooms that makes them so neurologically complex—but you are advised to study nothing but optical illusions for the next six months.

[Image: One more by Auguste Choisy].

Of course, you’re told, if it ever becomes too much, you can simply look away, forcing yourself to focus on only one detail at a time before opening yourself back up to the surrounding spatial confusion.

After all, as Banks writes in New Scientist, the discomfort caused by one’s first exposure to 3D-viewing technology simply “dissipates when you stop viewing 3D content. Interestingly, the discomfort is known to be greater in adolescents and young adults than in middle-aged and elderly adults.”

So what do you think—could (or should?) certain works of architecture ever be banned for neurologically damaging children under a certain age? Is there any evidence that spatially disorienting children’s rooms or cribs have the same effect as 3D glasses?