1. Ornament and Biomimicry:
Life Drawing Architectural Details
Aaltos’ Paimio Sanitorium
The Aaltos’ PAIMIO SANATORIUM, completed 1933, focuses on design details that engage with experiential events of its patients and hospital staff; challenging “the hegemony of vision in the ocular-centrism of our culture”. Largely encased in glass, this administration space within the lobby provided functional protection for hospital workers against contracting tuberculosis and the material detail enables workers the function of looking into the waiting area.
As a hospital environment, there is a necessity to prioritise design that assist cleaning practices. Aalto’s use of curved walls simultaneously assists with easier sweeping - with no corners for debris to become stuck in - while also keeping surrounding walkways clear. Thus, this creates an authentic architectural experience, “derived from real bodily confrontations”.
The small desk in this nook reflects the haptic architecture of the space by allowing weakened patients to recline slightly and support themselves while communicating with workers. While not instantly obvious, this architectural experience is “appreciated and comprehended gradually” by use over time.
Likewise, a carefully positioned skylight, approximately the width of a human body, directly sits on top of where the sick patient would stand, reflecting the emphasis on sunlight in treating TB patients. This “hidden tactile experience determines the sensuous quality of the perceived object”: in this case, it expresses a gentle warmth and empathy for the patient in its embrace.
Designing with contingent domestic circumstances
In ‘The Uses of Disorder’, Richard Sennett wrote: “Life as it is lived allows for things to break, there is in this breaking opportunity for growth, for re-use, for adaptation.”
To design with contingencies captures the nature of design as a spontaneous process; responding to chance encounters to create unlikely relationships between seemingly separate objects and enabling new functionality. Fittingly, I chose this retro, wooden plant stand that I had encountered by chance in a nearby council clean-up a few weeks ago to start my design.
Reflecting Alberti’s claim that “designing interiors is a process of finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place”, this design inquiry responded to two ongoing needs of my partner and I; somewhere to place this plant stand and somewhere to store our yoga mats so they would remain rolled up.
I decided to remove the surface of the stand to position the yoga mats carefully within the quadrants so that they would recline upright against the timber frame. However, as the stand was backed up against a wall, and the yoga mats would fall out of place when I moved it, I was limited to keeping the stand stationary and only accessing the two front-facing “slots”.
Inspired by Catseyebay’s makeshift, in situ practice, I gathered other elements used in exercise.
Through playfully and spontaneously interacting with the plant stand I recognised the possibility of using resistance bands to keep the mats in place, and the opportunity for portability through elevating the mats onto the removed platform.
This generated ‘a murmuring, a low hum, a sympathy between things” through the related nature of all the different components, capturing the new relationship between the domestic stand and outdoor yoga mats in a time where exercise is advised to be practiced in the domestic atmosphere.
Where Scarpa “takes us by the hand” - with great care taken in detailing the points at which the human hand meets his buildings - Aalto similarly focuses on his sanatorium as “a carefully and empathetically studied instrument” through the use of human centred design details.
Capturing this design philosophy, I wrapped therapeutic tape around one of the wood beams; offering some comfort for the sore hands of the user carrying the stand back inside after an intense workout, inviting a “tactile intimacy”.
