Field Paoli

John Field, FAIA, founded our firm in 1986. Over the course of his long career, he’s drawn on his deep knowledge of the spatial character of older American and European urban forms, adapting them to create livable, dense mixed-use centers throughout California. Attending the Monterey Design Conference last fall sparked a discussion between John and principal Rob Anderson about city-building and the role of spectacle in architecture. We thought this restatement of fundamentals was appropriate as our first post for 2016.

Rob Anderson: What thoughts did you come away with after the conference?

John Field: After all the presentations, my main thought was that the classic measures that humans use to orient ourselves in our constructed world are vanishing. Buildings aren’t horizontal and vertical anymore.

Rob: What do we lose by moving away from the horizontal and the vertical?

John: Let me make an analogy. A friend of mine had a stroke recently. One of the things that can happen with a stroke is that it can impair a person’s proprioception—the ability to sense your own body’s position, movement, and acceleration. If this ability is damaged, it’s hard to distinguish place, to sense up or down or far or near—all of the things we use to understand the organization of the world around us. We take this faculty for granted. But if you talk to anyone whose proprioception has been affected, they’ll say they’ve never known anything so frightening in their whole lives.

I’ve been thinking that this may explain the negative reaction the public has toward some of the contemporary architecture that is often celebrated in the design press—swooping, curving forms or fragmented geometries that forgo the classic proportions that have long defined cities. They induce the same kind of disorientation.

Rob: There does seem to be an increasing hunger for spectacle. That relates, I think, to the increased role of technology in our lives. We’re all so bombarded with visual information that people come to expect something more fantastic at every turn.

John: Ever since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was completed, architects have been designing buildings that deliberately destroy up, down, far, and near, because this is exciting. And these buildings are exciting, as visual objects. But do they make an environment we can all live in? Or are they eroding our sense of the world around us?

Rob: You couldn’t have very many Frank Gehry buildings in any one city. But the Bilbao museum is credited with creating a focal point that helped revive the downtown.

John: The museum is downtown, but there is no other building near it. Gehry buildings can’t have a neighbor. Look at his Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. The parking garage right across the street makes me think somebody left their elephant downtown. It is unrelated, and kind of ruins the elegance of Gehry’s sculpture.

When I got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Yale, the architecture program there was really experimental. But the thing that my teachers kept coming back to was that the path the foot takes and the path that the eye takes are not necessarily the same, but they are simultaneous. Perhaps what troubles me the most about some contemporary architecture is that neither the eye nor the foot knows the other is on a path.                                            

The brilliance of Frank Lloyd Wright was that he understood the pageantry of experience that is extremely satisfying to the human animal. Arriving at a goal is very satisfying, even if it’s just reaching the top of a hill to see at a wonderful view.

Rob: We still need to pay attention to the fourth dimension, time, that experience of moving through a place. It goes back to the Italian Baroque style—those architects created a sequence of spaces to walk through. And that was what gave those buildings their dynamism.

John: City building is about creating a sequence of experience. It’s about designing buildings and spaces that you inhabit, rather than objects that you look at. I’m not arguing against innovative forms. I’m just saying we shouldn’t value spectacle at the expense of the classic principles of city building. The needs of a city are not any different than they were 100 years ago. And the animals that occupy cities—human beings—are the same as they were 100 years ago.