The power of buildings

THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT

If your job revolves around working on computers like mine does, the advantages of having mobile technology now mean you can work from pretty much anywhere. You have a choice. If you are fortunate enough to live near the sea or your home office window opens out onto a sublime view of the mountains or rolling countryside, you'll have nature there to inspire you every day. Being a city dweller, it's not as easy to take inspiration from nature unless your house has a garden, backs on to a park/woods or overlooks a river, so we have to create our environments to inspire us.

Architecture

Beautiful buildings are 3-dimensional structures of working art. They are designed to have function but also form, with focus on shape, texture, colour & light - in clever ways to make us feel secure, enlightened & powerful. To be around beautiful architecture, you have to be in a place to view it and up til recently, I had a fantastic view of St Paul's and The River Thames from my workplace. Seeing the sun reflecting from the dome of this monumental British cathedral - the light creating an ethereal glow - I'd get a nostalgic sense of belonging to something great. The images of St Paul's standing defiantly amid the devastation from the blitz - propaganda, I know but still powerful enough to evoke emotions of pride, dignity and courage through adversity. 

Creating environments

Now I'm working from a home office, the environment is confined to just the internal space of a small room and therefore, the environment has to be improved with the use of furnishings, lighting and enhanced with objet d'art, plants & music. This can also be a great place for creativity but to really take advantage of the technology readily available to me and easy accessibility via public transport to the many beautiful places in a city like London, I need to make use of other great spaces to work from. This might be a gallery, library, restaurant, cafe or bar.

One place that immediately springs to mind is the cafe in The Victoria & Albert Museum. Not only is this a beautiful building from the outside, but it has so much inside in the forms of exhibitions and the cafe is buzzing with creative energy.

The power of art as architecture

Louis Khan was someone who really understood how to create emotional connection to buildings and the environment. The opening image on this blog is one of my favourites. I don't know enough about the great minds behind some of the world's most amazing architecture, but It's definitely an important topic I'll be looking into more, as buildings & man-made structures will be my source of inspiration while living in a city.

For further reading I'll look into these:
The Power of Architecture
The Power of Buildings

Another great source of inspiration on architecture that I listen to is called 99% invisible - one of the recent podcasts that really moved me, is the one on the World Trade Centre.

I also found this article on using the power of your environment to promote positive change this morning that's worth a read too.