Theory of People and Architecture: Week 2

Moving through week 2 of class, I have begun to try to find what it means to design for people. After some research and readings, I understood the topic more as “inclusive design”. I see inclusive design as being able to meet the requirements of the user experience within a specific space. Whether it is size, program, systematic layouts, people need and have specific notions of what needs to be in space. The architecture for people needs to make sense for the user to feel comfortable within a project, especially a home or work environment.

After furthering knowledge about the workplace in our studio, it is my understanding that people still need certain elements of an office environment. Some unsuccessful works try to take the work “work” out of “work-space”. Office spaces are changing in the present and becoming more progressive for the future of the workplace. People still need to be able to get projects and work done within the space. I read “Bigness” by Rem Koolhaas, and what I took was that people, in the old office typology, felt like one in a million and of no importance. Today, people work better and more efficiently when they feel like they are apart of something bigger. From this, I started to understand that these larger workspaces need to be split into more isolated spaces of groups of people (either team space, or open office filled with collaboration), but the parts still need to remain committed to the whole. People feel less comfortable within a larger space and narrowing down and dividing a larger space will help to relieve that feeling that many people have.

Looking forward to a more narrowed question, I have a passion for the way people live and work. Whether those lives are separate or combined, people need a space to feel efficient and comfortable. In addition to this idea, I started to read some papers from Bjarke Ingels and looking at his website with his collection of projects. It was interesting the way that the projects could be simplified and narrowed down to a symbol. Most of the time people feel uncomfortable in this type of architecture because of it is derived from architectural theory that is written by architects for architects. Bjarke makes this notion a much simpler one. The buildings are understood and experienced through the symbol. People who enter the space do not have to guess what is to come in the building if they know or have seen the symbol throughout. The building or project may not be a known symbol but a symbol is made for the user to understand the design and intentions. I gathered from this exploration that architecture can be appreciated and accepted, by ordinary people and those within the field of architecture, even as a simplistic form.

Thinking about both Koolhaas and Ingels, it is apparent that they both have strong theoretical and symbolic approaches to their designs. I had purchased S, M, L, XL to try to further my understanding of how Koolhaas’ thoughts start to transpire within his firm’s work. Understanding how people function, understood from the varying nature of the levels and activities of a skyscraper to the movement and feeling of people within a world of Bigness and the dominance of that form of architecture. Moving forward I am curious to figure out a connection between the social sciences of people and be able to try to understand the theories and be able to see how it can be transferred into architecture and design.