Had a drawing teacher called Betty Edwards. I never met Ms Edwards, other than through a book, but she was a pretty classy teacher. Not that I was much of a student, but at least she took me from stick figures to something that was at least recognisably human.
Ms Edwards made a bizarre but very intelligent observation. She said too many sketchers attempt to draw things. This, she opined, was completely the wrong way to go about it. It was better, she said, to draw the spaces around and between the things rather than the things themselves. The paces between, of course, are odd, so the brain sees them as pure shape, allowing the hand to draw them as pure shape. Whereas if you try to draw the thing itself, your brain does a lot of unnecessary overtime and says, “”I know what that is. It is a man. And a man has two long arms, two long legs a round head and an oblong body.” And so you end up with an unrealistic stick figure. In reality, one of the man’s arms might be shorter than his hand because it is stretched out towards the viewer with the hand in a stop gesture.
Ms Edwards came to mind the other day in a little town down at the coast. I was looking at some new houses and some others under construction. It had nothing to do with drawing, but I was thinking about Ms Edwards’s view about the spaces between things.
These proud home-owners were being very dumb. They were obsessed by the walls of their house, not the spaces the walls were creating, both indoors and out.
Most of these coastal developments started years ago with a virgin piece of land along the shore. The developer carves a road along the shore a short distance from the sea. On the landward side of the road, he then pegs out blocks. He tries to get as many blocks facing the sea as possible to get more money, so he crams as many blocks along the road as possible. All the blocks have narrow road frontages and run deep, presumably to make a statutory minimum size.
The people who buy the blocks then build their houses. Sub-consciously they build rectangular houses across the narrow block _ it shows the maximum amount of house to the street. (Look what a nice big house we have.)
Many are two-storey with balconies looking out to sea. The balconies looked out to sea, but I did not see any humans sitting on those balconies looking out to sea _ because the balconies are right on the road. The only usable outdoor space is out the back. Also the houses all face east-west and get the worst of the on-shore and off-shore wind.
I have no doubt the roads, drainage, water and footpaths in these developments are of good quality and so, no doubt, is the building. But no-one had thought about Ms Edwards’s spaces.
What if a public walkway with a strip of park had been put along the shore with the houses fronting that? The road could have gone behind the houses.
The houses could have been angled on the block to create attractive spaces. And they could have had corner windows to get both the best solar aspect and view of the sea. You hardly ever see windows on corners of houses.
Travelling around coastal hamlets, I’d say four in five houses and many roads could have been better placed for exactly the same amount of money.
Some of the houses stood stark on their blocks, as symbols the wealth rather than taste or brains.
There was some evidence that some are learning to do things smarter, but by-and-large we still entrust our suburban architecture and design to builders, which means you don’t get any architecture or design at all. And as for landscaping, we bung in a bit of lawn and some shrubs.
Good design and landscaping cost a little extra. But people are not prepared to pay for it because at the initial plans stage it does not appear that you get anything for your money. So in the vast bulk of houses and units on the coast there is virtually no evidence of good design or landscaping, though there are exceptions that prove the point.
Having gone to all the trouble and expense of servicing and dividing the land and getting the materials to build dwellings, why not spend that tiny bit extra to get the best out of the investment.
On a casual look at coastal hamlets there seemed to be far too much concentration on the bricks and mortar themselves, not the spaces they create. And let’s face it, you don’t live in the wall; you live in the space it creates.