The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Adrian Forty
Paul Frankl, a German art historian of the generation before Pevsner, described
the interiors of baroque churches, he might almost have been talking
about the Festival Hall. Consider, for example, the following remark:
“The less interesting the contour, the stronger is our perception of the space
that fills the contour and of its continuity. The lack of emphasis of the spatial
boundary also makes us aware of the continuity between the interior
space and the open exterior space.” Or take his comments about centrally
planned churches, in which “all entrances are necessary evils. We are not
supposed to enter such a church slowly and approach its centre step by step.
We are supposed, as if by magic, to arrive with one bound at this central
point.” 2 The entry to the Festival Hall could not be better described: in its
original state, before a new main entrance was created on the north, riverfront
facade, the principal entrance to the Festival Hall was at ground level
on the east side, through a relatively inconspicuous bank of doors. These
opened to a low-ceilinged vestibule, from which a short flight of steps, also
covered by a soffit, lead up to the foyer; only when one has mounted these
steps, and turned ninety degrees to the right, does one see much—and then
what one sees is nothing less than the entire interior volume of the foyer,
opening in every direction, above, beneath, and behind. By such means, one
has the impression of having “arrived with one bound” at the central point
of the building.
These and other insights suggest that one may see the Festival Hall
as a baroque building—though obviously it is not. My point is not to try to
pursue this comparison any further, but rather to think about how one
might arrive at some account of the “experience” of the building. If we are
to make any sense of the claim that the Festival Hall was “democratic,” we
will get nowhere by examining the building itself. As a thing, the building
can tell us nothing about people’s encounters with it, or with each other
within it; all it can tell us is about its own material existence. Its significance
as architecture, its aesthetic or political being, does not reside in its concrete,
steel, glass, and marble elements, nor in their combination, but in the
minds of those who have gone into it. The difficulty that faces the historian
is first how to discover what those experiences were, and second how to relate
them to what we now see; for we cannot assume that our perceptual apparatus
is the same as that of those in the past. Frankl’s book The Principles
of Architectural History, from which I have quoted, is of interest here because—though
first published in 1914—it has had few successors in the attempt
to provide a systematic scheme for analyzing past architecture in
terms of experience.
Frankl did not use the word “experience”: he took it for granted
that the way to know architecture was by means of the bodily sensations,