Where Architecture Begins
To understand what creates good architecture, let's dive a little bit into the origins of it. I must say that I'm not an anthropologist, nor a historian or an academic; that said, I don't want this writing to feel like a thesis but as a perspective.
I like to believe that a bonfire might be the first expression of architecture ever. Let's think about that for a moment. A bonfire defines a space of light in the darkness of the night, it acts like a place to preserve human existence, it creates a safe space where other creatures might not come by and harm you in the dark, it creates heat to convey shelter. And finally, beyond mere survival, it gives people a place to gather and share their existence together.
I think that any space defined by human experience IS architecture. You can see this in the closest expression of it, like a house — but also somewhere you'd never think to look. Like a data center, a factory, an industrial warehouse, or a power plant. All of them keep the same understanding of a bonfire. They define a created space, safeguard human existence, and should protect and shelter you, making you feel safe and comfortable. If you look at good examples of these spaces in depth, they express order, safekeeping, rhythm, even beauty.
Take a turbine room: massive machines set in careful order, each one scaled to the last, repeating down the length of the hall. There's a rhythm to that repetition, a logic you can feel before you understand it. The same order, the same safekeeping of purpose, that lets a bonfire hold back the dark. Or take a server room, where hundreds of small lights flicker along the racks. Information itself, translated into light, composing a pattern that shifts and pulses like something almost alive. Neither of these spaces was built to be beautiful. And yet if you stand in one that's well made, you feel the same things you'd feel standing near a well-built house: order, scale, rhythm, safekeeping. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, surely, but something about order, color, light, scale, and rhythm keeps composing it anyway, whether or not anyone meant it to.
So how does this translate to your experience of architecture? Let's be clear, not every factory is well made, not every power plant is perfectly safe and orderly. Just like not every house, store, hotel, or any other space you experience is well designed. I went this far with these examples to give you a very specific notion: when any architecture is well thought out, planned, and executed, no matter what space it is, it will give a human a better experience.
There's no easier translation of these concepts than the project La Fábrica by Ricardo Bofill. An abandoned concrete factory refurbished to accommodate Bofill's private house and studio. He saw the beauty in a concrete skeleton, the geometric composition of the silos, the overwhelming perception of those high ceilings where machines once mixed raw material. This space, as a factory, worked for decades, with function and purpose. Now the building exposes every characteristic of the bonfire: it protects and shelters, it gives warmth, defines space, and more than anything, creates the space where human existence performs, thinks, dreams…
This is where you can be a little bit more perceptive and judgmental about the space around you. When you look into the little decisions: the disposition of windows, the placement of doors and hallways, the materials, even the placement of the light switches. This is the difference between an atmosphere that feels well thought through and one where something's gone missing. Sometimes it is very subtle, but they create an experience regardless.
