Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect

Author: Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 12 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/mcclure_2018-inside-looking-in-prospect-aspect.md — Note: the raw copy's title line carries the typo "aspcect"; the chapter's term throughout is "aspect."

Summary

Practitioner-educators Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure (emerymcclure architecture) name and argue for a spatial quality they call the prospect of the aspect: "an experiential multiplicity of an object or space" in which being within a boundary (interior) and looking beyond and experiencing that boundary (exterior) are simultaneously, recursively held — "the looking forward from how one perceives and the continuation of that experiential multiplicity." The chapter's opening claim is that the most impactful artifacts of human occupation "resist the modernist impulse to be singularly understood. Instead, they are integrated, complex systems that resist separation," and that only the design disciplines separate interior from exterior, landscape, and urbanism, "while in reality these elements are experienced as connected conditions." Three built essays carry the argument across scales and eras — the Pantheon (the oculus collapsing interior, building, and exterior; the piazza as urban room), Aalto's Säynätsalo Town Hall (the exterior courtyard-room and the council chamber framing the prospect horizontally and vertically), and the Centre Pompidou (the city passing through the building; escalator tubes as bracketed interiors; the rooftop where "any singular aspect of the object has dissipated; it has become wholly part of the prospect"). Against this stands the "modernist hermetic seal": air conditioning's "absolute boundary between inside and outside," which let interiors "no longer negotiate – or even acknowledge – the exterior," aligned with the professional and legal isolation of the disciplines. The stake is temporal: spaces with the prospect of the aspect persist across cultural shifts and "will resist obsolescence," while the Walmart (estimated useful life: seventeen years) and the demolished American Folk Art Museum do not.

Key Claims

"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 chapter's founding diagnosis: the division of interior/exterior/landscape/urbanism is disciplinary, not experiential.
Definition: "The prospect of the aspect describes an experiential multiplicity of an object or space." Prospect and aspect both derive from the Latin specere, "to look" — pro-, "forward," and ad-, "to, at" — so the condition is "the looking forward from how one perceives and the continuation of that experiential multiplicity."
The condition is boundary-holding, not boundary-denying: "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)."
The condition is recursive: "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" (note 2 identifies the Droste effect with mise en abyme). "It is never a singular experience, as its physical construction denies spatial exclusivity."
The counter-position is named in the section heading: "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."
Technology produced the seal: "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."
Code completed the isolation: "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."
Via Venturi (Complexity and Contradiction, notes 3–4): the modernist doctrine "less is more… bemoaned complexity and justified exclusion for expressive purposes. It … permitted [one] to be highly selective in determining which problems to solve"; against it: "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."
The disciplinary mechanism: "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."
The condition's structure: "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" across "shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms."
The archetypal program: "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." See axis-mundi.
The Pantheon close reading: the sphere-in-cylinder creates "an unavoidable and overwhelmingly powerful center" drawn into "a vertical axis mundi through the introduction of the oculus"; the octave niches, paneled marble, coffered dome, and cornice banding "all work to reinforce a prospect to the axis mundi"; 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." The recursion continues outward: "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." The measure-claim: "The prospect of the aspect created at the oculus is so powerful that it becomes the measure of the enveloping neighborhood."
The Säynätsalo case: Aalto's complex "similarly dissolves the isolation of these scales" (architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture); the heavy masonry threshold follows Aalto's site-planning principle (quoted via Frampton, note 5): "a given building is invariably separated into two distinct elements, and the space between is articulated as a space of human appearance." The exterior room under sky, the prospect "forced to the surrounding vertical birch trees and the sky above," the council chamber's north-facing window whose "vertical slatted shutters mimic the vertical trees in the distance" — "a dialog between the two thresholds that frame the prospect horizontally and vertically." Culmination: "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."
The Pompidou variation: "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."
The city through the building: "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."
The escalator tubes as bracketed interiors: "Inside the glass tubes, the overtly bracketed 'interior' space offers the prospect of the aspect to the strata of the surrounding context" — the dynamism of the escalators, orchestrated with frame and program, until "any singular aspect of the object has dissipated; it has become wholly part of the prospect. Looking forward, Paris lies proffered below." The recursion continues "on further toward the Eiffel Tower, which is its own example of this condition."
The inversion formula: "The perceived interior is turned inside-out." And: "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."
Rogers's rationale (DeZeen, note 6): "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." And (note 7): "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." The McClures add the persistence datum: "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 diagnosis of the present: "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."
The negative exemplars: "Most contemporary built contexts consist of the efficient metal building (Walmart), the nondescript strip mall, or the isolated object building (art museum)." The Walmart's estimated useful life is "seventeen years" (note 8 derives the figure from Wal-Mart's financial statements) — "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 Folk Art Museum as the isolated object's fate: "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" (the architects' statement quoted from Architectural Record, note 9). See obsolescence.
The binary trap: "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."
The program and the wager: 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."

Connections

Concepts: prospect-of-the-aspect · axis-mundi · hermetic-seal · obsolescence · inside-outside-dialectic · perspective · interior-architecture · interiority · interdisciplinarity · boundaries · thick-edge · urbanism · representation · sustainability · modernism Authors: Ursula Emery McClure & Michael A. McClure · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Robert Venturi (quoted at length, notes 3–4) · Kenneth Frampton (the Aalto quote, note 5) · Richard Rogers (quoted, notes 6–7 — not paged; see log) Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — the disciplinary-isolation critique and the call for "a more collaborative and cross-disciplinary environment" · climate-change-and-architecture — the air-conditioned hermetic seal as the boundary's technological origin (the chapter's implicit environmental stake) Related source notes: Webb — Inside out — the sibling boundary-chapter: Webb's "the outside is the inside distended" generation vs. the McClures' simultaneity ("both a connector and a separator"); both cite surfaces and thresholds belonging to both sides · La Coe — Quadrature — the oculus that places "the human at the center of the universe… the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis" re-runs Pozzo's re-centering of embodied man within homogeneous Cartesian space, now as axial experience rather than painted illusion · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the phenomenological counterpart: Bachelard's lived osmosis across the boundary is the McClures' designed condition ("simultaneously interior and exterior") · Borden — Thick Edge — the porch as "a liminal boundary" and the escalator tubes as thresholds that "frame the prospect horizontally and vertically" — thresholds as prospect-framing devices rather than exclusion lines · Manack — Fabricating interiority — the disciplinary-isolation thesis from the interior's side: the McClures' "isolation of the design disciplines" names professionally what Manack's inversion thesis names architecturally · Stokes-Rees — Symbiotic spaces — the civic-scale blur of city/museum/landscape parallels the Pompidou's city-through-building · Campos — Territory and inhabitation — the interior/territory reciprocity ("It creates its context and intertwines with it")

Direct Quotes

The chapter carries no page numbers in the wiki's OCR copy; quotes are located by section heading. Passages quoted from other authors carry the note numbers of the McClures' endnotes.

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening)

"The prospect of the aspect describes an experiential multiplicity of an object or space." (§ "Prospect and aspect")

"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." (§ "Prospect and aspect")

"It is never a singular experience, as its physical construction denies spatial exclusivity." (§ "Prospect and aspect")

"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." (§ "Modernist hermetic seal and the isolation of 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." (§ "Modernist hermetic seal")

"The building envelope became the boundary, and the object and its relative space could become entirely self-referential." (§ "Modernist hermetic seal")

"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." (§ "Modernist hermetic seal")

"Less is more," according to Venturi… "bemoaned complexity and justified exclusion for expressive purposes. It … permitted [one] to be highly selective in determining which problems to solve." (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, quoted § "Modernist hermetic seal," n. 3)

"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." (Venturi, quoted § "Modernist hermetic seal," n. 4)

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"The prospect of the aspect created at the oculus is so powerful that it becomes the measure of the enveloping neighborhood." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"a given building is invariably separated into two distinct elements, and the space between is articulated as a space of human appearance." (Aalto, quoted via Frampton, § "Occupying the Oculi," n. 5)

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi," on Säynätsalo)

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi," on Säynätsalo)

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (Richard Rogers, quoted § "Occupying the Oculi," n. 6)

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"The perceived interior is turned inside-out." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (§ "Occupying the Oculi")

"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." (Richard Rogers, quoted § "Occupying the Oculi," n. 7)

"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." (§ "What is at stake?")

"Most contemporary built contexts consist of the efficient metal building (Walmart), the nondescript strip mall, or the isolated object building (art museum)." (§ "What is at stake?")

"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." (§ "What is at stake?")

"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." (§ "What is at stake?")

"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." (Todd Williams & Billie Tsien, quoted from Architectural Record, n. 9)

"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." (§ "What is at stake?")

"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." (closing)

Open Questions

Is the prospect of the aspect a designable quality or only a retrospective analytic? The McClures present it "as an analytical tool" and a criterion "for both the intentions and critiques of the built environment," but all three exemplars (Pantheon, Säynätsalo, Pompidou) were not designed under the term — can the recursive simultaneity be specified in a brief, or only recognized after occupation?
The McClures' oculus places "the human at the center of the universe… the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis"; La Coe's Pozzo "re-center[ed] man within a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual" at the convergence of real and fictitious space. Are these two operations of one centering mechanism — architectural and pictorial variants of staging the occupant at the crossing of axes — or fundamentally different (experiential vs. representational) centerings?
The chapter equates persistence with the prospect of the aspect, but the Pantheon's survival owed as much to consecration and continuous use. Is the inclusivity thesis a description of why buildings persist, or an argument that they should be evaluated by persistence — and can a metric ("equally appreciated by the designer and the public") be operationalized?
The Walmart's seventeen-year "estimated useful life" is derived from corporate financial disclosures (note 8) — an accounting figure, not a demolition date. Is financial-depreciation data a legitimate evidentiary base for architectural-historical claims about obsolescence, and what does it measure (capital's horizon, not the building's)?
How does the prospect of the aspect relate to Jay Appleton's prospect-refuge theory (not cited in the chapter)? Both build on "prospect" as looking-out, but Appleton's is an evolutionary-aesthetic preference theory (habitat evaluation), while the McClures' is a relational-spatial condition — is the shared vocabulary superficial, or is "prospect" here the environmental-psychology concept writ architecturally? (See concepts index: no prospect-refuge page exists yet.)
The chapter's three exemplars are all civic-cultural buildings that became icons (the Pompidou is "the most visited building in Europe"). Does the prospect of the aspect describe an alternative to iconic architecture, or a quality that the most successful icons have always possessed — and does that ambiguity blunt the chapter's critique of "the isolated object building (art museum)"?
"The perceived interior is turned inside-out" (Pompidou rooftop) vs. Webb's "the outside is the inside distended" — are these the same inversion (interior generated from occupant looking) or two directions of it (inside-out expansion vs. outside-as-negative-of-inside)?

Notes

The chapter is Ch. 12 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018); the wiki's copy is OCR text with figures 12.1–12.3 referenced but not reproduced ("cones of vision, major and minor axis, and spatial continuum" at the Pantheon; Säynätsalo; "recursive prospect… at the Pompidou"). All three figures carry the credit "author."
Endnotes: (1) Merriam-Webster on "aspect"/"prospect"; (2) the Droste effect / mise en abyme (Wisgeek); (3)–(4) Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 2nd ed. (MoMA, 2011), pp. 24, 23; (5) Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (OUP, 1980), p. 197; (6)–(7) Richard Rogers, DeZeen, 26 July 2013; (8) Wal-Mart Stores Inc. estimated useful life calculation, Stock Analysis on Net; (9) "MoMA Begins Demolition of Folk Art Museum Building," Architectural Record, 14 April 2014.
The Säynätsalo discussion is the chapter's citation of Aalto via Frampton; "Saynatsalo" is the source's spelling.