Slowing down the buildings

In a comment on the previous post, a reader expressed appreciation for the way I describe things, saying that where she would have seen a stained-glass window showing the Holy Family and the Magi, I picked out a host of details, enhancing her enjoyment of the image. This is not the first comment I've had along these lines, and it pleased me greatly because it gets to the heart of what this blog is about - I point out some of the things I see in buildings, including details that others might miss, in the hope that my readers will be interested too.

One of the reasons I do this is because I'm all too aware that buildings - the biggest objects, on the whole, that humankind creates - are oddly easy to ignore. We might be awestruck by a great cathedral or annoyed by an ugly office block, but most people, most of the time, pay scant attention to the buildings around them.

Rushing around from place to place, few of us take the time to look at the buildings we pass. And when we do, how much do we actually take in? Most of us are like the gallery-goers who spend on average just a few seconds in front of each painting, identifying artist and subject but missing all but the most obvious details.

I'm remdinded of my experience of working for the publishers Dorliong Kindersley in the 1980s. Peter Kindersley was very aware of how little time people spend looking at images, and this was an issue of huge importance for a publisher of illustrated books. 'We need to slow down the pictures,' he would say. And so we adopted a variety of methods to make people look more closely at the pictures in our books - placing text right next to the part of the picture it was describing, using leader lines to point to specific parts of an image, commissioning cutaway illustrations, photographing an object from several different angles, and adding all this together to create complex pages in which words and pictures were integrated.

In this blog I try to slow down the buildings around us and showcase unregarded structures or unfamiliar aspects of well known ones. In so doing I hope to sharpen my eyes, to make myself more aware of telling details and neglected bits of the built environment. I hope to help others see more clearly too - though they may well see different things in the buildings I write about. The main thing that you need when looking at buildings, said John Betjeman, is not a guide book, or a theory, or a degree in art history, but 'an eye'. Everyone's eye is different. The important thing is to use it.