Before digital was born For many years I’ve held in my mind, as a counter to the headlong rush to a purely visual architecture, the memory of approaching a small church in an Italian hill town. This was an experience of architecture of all the senses. First came the feeling of a slight ache in the knees, an ache that told me I had climbed to an elevation. Then the entry into the building, the sudden drop in temperature, the increase in humidity.
The hushed yet reverberant sound. The dim light, after the glare of the piazza, slowly growing brighter as my pupils dilated. The sound of a motorcycle starting up outside, reinforcing my sense that I was inside. The smell of candles and of old stone and mortar. Walking forward, and feeling the unevenness of a floor whose surface had been sculpted for centuries by other feet, a surface placed, thus, in time. Finally, of course, the way the space configured and reconfigured as I moved through it, the kinetic sense that is probably the most essential quality of architecture.
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