Peter Cook: an earnest plea for a return to the time-honoured art of punctuation in today's super saturated visual world

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2007 by Peter Cook

Maybe it was the January sales in the local big store, maybe it was getting back from a search for the sun (or nowadays, a search for the snow), maybe it was just this morning, coming in to work? You zig-zagged in past a plethora of familiar names and signals, shouting or winking or just reminding you of the existence of Body Shop, Cool Drinks, Hot Drinks, 12 degrees centigrade, Accessorize, Fruit Bar, Tickets, Seven-Eleven, 7.25, Up, Down ... Interestingly, there isn't yet an international slogan for 'sideways', 'circuitous route' or 'keep your eyes skinned'.

Yet this is precisely the issue. Because through all this we have subliminally developed a series of techniques for both hooding our eyes and keeping them 'skinned'. A certain kind of amnesia has set in that is wonderfully able to ignore the presence of organically safe lipstick until the need arises, or to respond only to a hot or to a cold drink. This same amnesia is replaced by a momentary alertness that encourages us to take notice of yellow letters on a black background (I can see one right now, saying 'Gate 15'), and they're only some 90mm high.

Occasionally, when sitting round in planning meetings or making the first bold moves on a competition scheme, you become very aware of the old rules of engagement. You start to look for the logical sequence of events from taxi set-down through to platform, from bus stop to information point to trade counter. We remain curiously old-fashioned in a desire for an overriding logic. We haven't moved so far from the designers of the Waldorf-Astoria, Selfridges Store or the Gare du Nord, who announced the power and quality of the emporium and gave the punters an eyeful as soon as they were out of the cold. Next, they gave them somewhere to wait for a friend--or perhaps pretend to wait for a friend (some people would just sit there indulging in the most dynamic form of eye-candy: observing passers-by and inventing pocket scenarios for them).

Most essentially, these designers would place an enormous staircase or two in front of you where you couldn't miss it, or give you a view of the trains. Maybe putting a tarty bit of dome over the lift lobby, or at least putting something that looked like something there to remind you why you were there and where you might be going.

Sitting in our meeting, we still have an instinct to play that game. After all, architecture was (and maybe it still is) about making something that looks like something. Or has there been a quiet revolution? Have we somehow become dulled by a pernicious combination of socialist realism, value engineering and lack of invention? Are we somehow the handmaidens of an infinite exchangeability of one piece of space for another?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

You could, of course, argue from the opposite end. Are we not enjoying a form of carefree abandon when, determined not to miss the flight, we follow those little yellow letters up the ramps, down the escalators, unbelievably willing to make a sharp left and then a gradual right and up again? (Anyone using the extended parts of Heathrow or Frankfurt airports will know exactly what I mean.) The casbah has nothing on this. Perhaps those self-conscious domes and fountains were just an irritant in the pursuit of the necessary trajectory. Perhaps, back in the suburbs, we are reassured by the sight of Walgreens' friendly drugstore sign and find it far more articulate than the architecture--if indeed there is any--that surrounds it. Perhaps, in a culture that has got used to depending upon the summonable and dismissable text that comes up on your BlackBerry or laptop, we rate that as far more of a guide or a spur to action than any monument, boulevard, pedimented gate or flight of steps? Now we have new priorities.

Faced with this paradox, there is still a nagging feeling that we're not trying hard enough. We should still get back in there, going beyond mere discussions of sequence of diagrammatic logic which we then allow to disintegrate. Celebrating with identifiable architecture, not only churches and museums but dealing with smaller, more incidental shifts of pace, of mood or of action.

The trouble is that this would need a fresh input of ideas, a fresh input of mannerisms--a strong injection of vocabulary. In the same way as we pumped in some stuff from the world of mechanics and production 120, 80, 30 years ago, we need to pump in some more from the world of the moving picture or the steam bath, the world of the coffee house or the Highland hike. We need to pump in something that gives us the same range of buzzes that we can stick inside our ears anytime, anywhere--but through things, stuff, and the return of the art of punctuation in the visual world. Not only a new architecture, but an awareness of the range and potential grain of architecture.