Making Architecture Through Being Human by Philip D. Plowright;

Author:Philip D. Plowright;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

IMPORTANCE

IMPORTANCE CAN BE UNDERSTOOD as an event, substance or object on which we focus our attention. Our attention is a type of judgement that we project into our environment and through that judgement, we decide what value a thing holds and what might matter. When something distinguishes itself from its surroundings or draws our attention, this is an act of the human mind (see Difference). Importance is a contextual notion and operates through the relative relationships in a situation. A thing that might have importance in one context could be unimportant in another.

In our built environment, we constantly use the idea of importance to make sense of our surroundings as well as a design tool. It is one of the ways we make what might be a random environment into something comprehensible through the introduction of hierarchy, ordering systems such as axis and centrality, types of repetition, manipulation of light and object attributes that create difference.

The most obvious form of importance is the introduction of difference through the spatial location concepts of close and high as well as the scalar attribute of big. These concepts create a simple hierarchy based on relative relationships. Generally, if an object is close or appears to be close, people will consider it more important than something further away. An object or space located relatively high in an environment is considered more important than things that appear lower or below it. People generally consider something that is big as more important than something that is small (small things are often discounted as irrelevant or not mattering – which causes its own problems). Big and high have other meanings in human thinking, primarily connected to social status. Buildings that are considered socially or culturally important or to contain important events are often made to be prominent through being big. Height is associated with social status and power – the executive boardroom of a successful corporation is found high in buildings not only for the view but because it expresses power and control.

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