(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 12

Inside Looking In: the prospect of the aspcect

Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure

The most impactful, important, and relevant artifacts of human occupation have one striking similarity: they resist the modernist impulse to be singularly understood. Instead, they are integrated, complex systems that resist separation. Only the design disciplines separate an interior from an exterior, from a landscape, from an urbanism, while in reality these elements are experienced as connected conditions. The Pantheon in Rome, for example, is a complex, connected set of experiences that draws 1.5 million visitors every year. It is equally celebrated by the trained designer and the tourist. The Pantheon contains one of the most recognizable interior spaces ever created by humankind. Visitors are drawn inside as all attention is pulled toward the omnipresent axis mundi. It is a center. It is a cave; heavy, cool, and dimly lit. The oculus always draws the viewer’s attention to the sky and to the exterior. Consequently, the Pantheon is both a connector and a separator from the interior, from the landscape, and from the urban condition. To be under its portico temple front is to be simultaneously in the

Pantheon and in the landscape of the city. This multiple connectivity continues upon entry into the adjacent piazza and the city beyond.

The modernist distinctions between exterior and interior, and between object and space, do not hold at the Pantheon. The prospect is an aspect of its context. This chapter discusses the value of spaces that possess the prospect of the aspect – multiple interiorities across scales. Spaces that are simultaneously interior and exterior are not exclusive. They are inclusive, consistently defined, and reevaluated by their context. They persist through cultural shifts and thus contribute to their environs continuously across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms.

Prospect and aspect

The prospect of the aspect describes an experiential multiplicity of an object or space. The words prospect and aspect are derivatives from the Latin verb specere, “to look.” The word prospect from pro- “forward” and specere “to look,” and the word aspect from ad- “to, at” and specere “to look.”1 The prospect of the aspect is the looking forward from how one perceives and the continuation of that experiential multiplicity. It is a relationship between the exterior and the interior, but one that is not necessarily defined as under roof to not under roof. It is defined by the clarity of both being within a limited boundary (interior) and simultaneously looking beyond and experiencing that boundary (exterior). It is also infinitely repetitive. The prospect of the aspect is a recursive quality that gains its value in continuum and overlap, similar to standing between two mirrors that reflect continuously, also known as the Droste effect.2 It is never a singular experience, as its physical construction denies spatial exclusivity.

Modernist hermetic seal and the isolation of disciplines

It is in the denial of spatial exclusivity that the prospect of the aspect counters the modernist hermetic seal and isolation of the design disciplines. The invention of air conditioning in the early twentieth century led to many monumental changes in the constructed environment, none more or less important than an absolute boundary between inside and outside. The ability to seal off the interior from the exterior meant that the interior no longer needed to negotiate – or even acknowledge – the exterior. The surrounding context, environment, and human occupations could be ignored. The building envelope became the boundary, and the object and its relative space could become entirely self-referential. This isolation increased when coupled with the requirements for occupancy classifications, fire separations, and protected egress. Rooms could be just about rooms, buildings just about buildings, and landscapes just about landscapes. The modernist doctrine “less is more,” according to Venturi in his seminal book Complexity and Contradiction, “bemoaned complexity and justified exclusion for expressive purposes. It … permitted [one] to be highly selective in determining which problems to solve.” This exclusivity aligned with the professional distinction and education of the disciplines (architect, engineer, landscape architect, interior designer, etc.). The legal boundaries, the perceived boundaries, and the selected boundaries led to very static and singular objects and spaces, denying an architecture of complexity and contradiction that has a special obligation toward the whole. Its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion, rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.

Occupying the Oculi The prospect of the aspect only exists as part of the whole. It is both internally referential (look at) and externally referential (look forward). This characteristic establishes the truth of the condition, and it is also what helps a human-occupied object or space maintain its continuum and relevance. The object or space that possesses the prospect of the aspect continuously contributes and participates with its environs across shifting social, cultural,

and stylistic norms. Traditional projects from cultures around the world demonstrate a strong relationship between the prospect and the aspect. A heightened awareness of the prospect of the aspect is the main purpose of a menhir, a pyramid, a stupa, a stela, an obelisk, or a mound. They are objects that are to be looked at while simultaneously directing focus to another axis. It could be argued that for these archetypal projects, the prospect of the aspect is an essential program. The following three examples present variations of the prospect of the aspect and attempt to illustrate qualitatively this connectivity and inclusiveness.

The Pantheon in Rome serves as the first example of this fully developed relationship. Much like its traditional precedents, the Pantheon is concerned with an extremely minimal program and was once an object in a field. In its current urban context, it offers a complex, connected set of internal-external experiences. Though the object is simple, the prospect of the aspect is quite complex. The Pantheon draws the occupant in – it is an interior. The sphere imposed within a cylinder creates an unavoidable and overwhelmingly powerful center. That center is drawn into a vertical axis mundi through the introduction of the oculus. The space demands that attention be paid to the center, or away from it. Every aspect of the interior supports this reading: the octave division of niches, the paneled marble of the walls and floor, the coffered dome, the horizontal cornice banding that highlights precisely where the dome and cylinder meet, all work to reinforce a prospect to the axis mundi. Once there, an aspect to a measured representation of the geometries at play is revealed. This recursive relationship reaches an apex at the oculus. The oculus draws the eye to the sky by experientially collapsing the interior, the building, and the exterior. At the oculus, an interior that is designed to focus all of its energy to the center immediately reverses, placing the human at the center of the universe, and becoming the intersection of a universal $x$, $y$, and $z$ axis. As soon as the occupant believes a spatial moment has been defined, another begins. Consequently, the Pantheon is both a connector and separator from the interior and the exterior – from nature, from the landscape, and from the urban. This recursive spatial relationship continues upon exiting the

rotunda. The colonnaded porch sets a liminal boundary to the plaza, which itself is an urban room designed as an interior space. The surrounding buildings read as interior walls of the space, not as exterior facades. This multiple connectivity continues in the adjacent piazza and the city beyond. The prospect of the aspect created at the oculus is so powerful that it becomes the measure of the enveloping neighborhood (Figure 12.1).

Although the purest examples of the prospect of the aspect can be exemplified in such a premodern expression, this spatial condition has continued to be an important analytical tool. The same complex interrelationships can be found in modern and contemporary examples. Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall, with an entirely different program, material, culture, and location, creates a similar recursive experience. Like the Pantheon, Saynatsalo offers prime examples of quality architecture, interior architecture, and landscape architecture. Saynatsalo also similarly dissolves the isolation of these scales. A centralized space is accessed through a heavy masonry threshold, employing Aalto’s site planning principle wherein “a given building is invariably separated into two distinct elements, and the space between is articulated as a space of human appearance.” The entrance leads up and into a low, square exterior (under sky) room, a room that keeps its walls low, yet emphasizes the vertical through a measured expression of thin columns. The prospect is now forced to the surrounding vertical birch trees and the sky above. Like the Pantheon, there is a simultaneous connection to and separation from nature. Here, however, the physical relationship has changed. Standing in the oculus, instead of under and looking forward from it, the prospect and the aspect are brought into a conversation in the thin, yet simultaneously expansive, threshold. The double height volume of the council chamber continues the prospect of the aspect. The tower and its implied interior can be experienced from the central exterior space. The council chamber’s interior draws attention up to the structure. It reframes the exterior with a large north-facing window, whose vertical slatted shutters mimic the vertical trees in the distance. This becomes a dialog between the two thresholds that frame the prospect horizontally and vertically. The complex is a building and an urbanism; it is

an object and a space, but most of all, it is an overlapping of interiors. It creates its context and intertwines with it (Figure 12.2).

Image credit: author

A third, more recent example presents another application of the prospect of the aspect. The Centre George Pompidou in the Marais District of Paris establishes a different – but no less powerful – prospect of the aspect. While the Pantheon and Saynatsalo create a clear scalar escalation of the condition, in-to-out and out-to-in, the Centre Pompidou is a bit more gloriously convoluted. Here, the urban room, the surrounding city, and the building are all spaces/objects with the prospect of the aspect. The building essentially becomes a scaffolding to offer views from itself: views to the plaza, to the city low, and to the city high. From every aspect of the building’s exterior, the prospect is offered. Richard Rogers explains the rationale behind the design:

The idea was that you had a public space, and you’d go up the facade of the building in streets in the air with escalators floating across it, so the whole thing became very dynamic. People come to see people as well as to see art; people come to meet people. So we wanted to practice that as theatre.

The complexity of the steel frame rectangle is truly remarkable. The overlap begins on the approach from any of the Parisian streets, perpendicular or parallel. No matter how much space outlies the actual Centre Pompidou, it is consistently embedded in its context. Even when entering the plaza, the scale of the building is so encompassing that the plaza does not act as a space before the building (a space to view the object), but instead slips through the steel frame, appearing to pass under and through the ground floor. The city never stops; it passes right through the building. Simultaneously, similar to the piazza outside of the Pantheon, the Pompidou’s plaza is very much an interior room in the city, entered through multiple portals. The plaza occupant is both in and out. This condition continues in the ascent and descent of the escalators. Inside the glass tubes,

the overtly bracketed “interior” space offers the prospect of the aspect to the strata of the surrounding context. From the surrounding buildings’ fenestrated walls, down the street canals, over the plaza, and eventually the rooftops, all is presented in isolation and overlap. The dynamism of the escalators enables this prospect of the aspect, but it is in their careful orchestration with the steel frame and the program (the city, the museum, the art, and the French culture) that solidifies it, until final arrival at the rooftop. The frame is under, the escalators and pipes aside, any singular aspect of the object has dissipated; it has become wholly part of the prospect. Looking forward, Paris lies proffered below. The recursiveness of the prospect of the aspect continues on further toward the Eiffel Tower, which is its own example of this condition (Figure 12.3).

The rooftop of the Centre Pompidou, similar to the interior central axis of the Pantheon and the courtyard of Saynatsalo, is both a connector and separator from the interior and the exterior; from nature, from the landscape, and from the urban. The perceived interior is turned inside-out. Even though it is clearly a space with defined edges, the spatial expansiveness of the universal $x$, $y$, and $z$ axes the rooftop provides is palpable. Conceptually conceived of as a “theater for the people,” the Centre Pompidou’s spatial articulations epitomize the looking at the looking from; the prospect of the aspect. Even at its young age of forty-four years, the building has already persisted through cultural shifts and continues to contribute to its environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms.

“The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people, and the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe.”

Figure 12.3 The recursive prospect of the aspect at the Pompidou (cones of vision, urban spatial layering, and horizontal and vertical inclusiveness)

Image credit: author

What is at stake?

Why concern ourselves with this analysis? Is this a mandate for more flexible and systemically integrated designs that achieve relevance through their inclusivity? Is this a call for a more collaborative and cross-disciplinary environment? Absolutely, but the present system is seemingly set up against the creation of a complex and integrated built environment. The design disciplines have been isolated professionally and legally. The benefit has been that each discipline has been able to develop its expertise, but the cost has been a built environment that is increasingly separated from its site, its context, and society. Most contemporary built contexts consist of the efficient metal building (Walmart), the nondescript strip mall, or the isolated object building (art museum). For the first two types, not only are they applied everywhere, ambivalent to their surrounding environments, they are also constructed with an ambivalence for persistence. The average Walmart, for example, is given an estimated useful life of seventeen years. In comparison to the 2,000-year-old Pantheon or even the 63-year-old Saynatsalo, this obsolescence speaks to a practice of exclusivity and

efficiency, where the primary (and some might argue only) consideration is the corporate gain, not a continued contribution to the physical environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms. The practice of exclusivity affects the isolated object building as well. Todd Williams and Billie Tsien’s short-lived American Folk Art Museum (2001–2014) exemplifies what happens when a design cannot maintain multiple complex connections, as noted in the Architectural Record:

While the demolition is deeply painful to all of us who helped create it, our distress is of secondary importance to the civic, cultural, and sustainable issues the debate surrounding the building has raised. We remain deeply grateful to all who have protested this senseless and unnecessary act of destruction.

This is not to say that contemporary examples of environments that exploit the prospect of the aspect are not present, nor are they solely limited to large public buildings. Examples can be found everywhere and at every scale, but the examples of isolated, nonintegrated landscapes, buildings, and interiors prevail. Too often, both the intention and the evaluation of the built environment are set as binary oppositions of this versus that: function vs. form, cost vs. quality, scale vs. scope, efficiency vs. waste, inside vs. outside, urban vs. rural, traditional vs. modern, and practical vs. poetic. The modernist tenet of “less is more” still dominates, and the “unity of inclusion” still remains difficult.

If the designers of objects and spaces hope to maintain and produce new built environments that are equally appreciated by the designer and the public, they must make the case that the prospect of the aspect should be included in both the intentions and critiques of the built environment. It is these spaces that will resist obsolescence; they will not be destroyed when their current program or style becomes outdated. As with similar projects before them, those that incorporate the prospect of the aspect will persist.

Notes

1. “Aspect” and “prospect”, Merriam-Webster.com, 2015, www.merriam-webster.com/.
2. The Droste effect identifies a technique in art that creates a recursive picture in which a smaller version of the image is placed inside itself repeatedly. This effect is also referred to as mise en abyme, which generally describes the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing an infinite reproduction of one’s image. Mary McMahon, “What Is the Droste Effect”, Wisgeek, www.wisgeek.com/what-is-the-droste-effect.htm (accessed 26 April 2015).
3. Robert Venturi and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York and Boston, MA: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), p. 24.
4. Ibid., p. 23.
5. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 197.
6. Richard Rogers, “The Pompidou Captured the Revolutionary Spirit of 1968 – Richard Rogers”, DeZeen Magazine, 26 July 2013, www.dezeen.com/2013/07/26/richard-rogers-centre-pompidou-revolution-1968/ (accessed 5 April 2015).
7. Ibid.
8. Estimated total useful life (years) = (Property and equipment, gross – Land) – Depreciation expense for property and equipment, including amortization of property under capital leases = (182,634 – 26,261) ÷ 9,100 = 17. “Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)”, Stock Analysis on Net, www.stock-analysis-on.net/NYSE/Company/Wal-Mart-Stores-Inc/Analysis/Property-Plant-and-Equipment#Estimated-Total-Useful-Life (accessed February 2015).
9. “MoMA Begins Demolition of Folk Art Museum Building”, Architectural Record, 14 April 2014, http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2014/04/140414-MoMA-Begins-Demolition-Folk-Art-Museum.asp (accessed 5 April 2015).