GHASSAN ALSERAYHI
 MSc. Arch, M. Arch, B. Arch, Assoc. SCE

ARCHITECT + EDUCATOR + RESEARCHER
Building’s Character(s)


  ‘Character’ is a word that crops up in various contexts when referring to the built environment. It's often used in real estate discussions like when apartment hunting. I'm fascinated by the idea that buildings have stories that shape the building’s character; it's a driving force in my thinking, and part of that fascination lies in the word 'character,' which I've spent quite a bit of time pondering over. Historically, the notion of character in buildings played a pivotal role in rejuvenating architectural thinking in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word transcended mere aesthetic appeal, becoming a lens through which buildings were analyzed, categorized, and evaluated. This historical context reminds us that the term once had depth and meaning, serving as a tool to understand the building's personality, function, and relationship to its genre. When applied to people, 'character' can mean seemingly opposite things. On one hand, it refers to an ineffable foundation of being: something serious, strong, and intrinsic to their constitution. But on the other hand, it also describes an artifice, a superficial veil of attributes one might portray in a play. Additionally, the notion that a building might be a character in a story is explored in books and films, particularly when the setting plays a central role. One of the best movies that expresses this idea is Beetlejuice, where the house itself becomes a pivotal element in the narrative, transporting people to different dimensions and reflecting the spirit of its inhabitants as it undergoes transformations.

The concept of character in architecture is intriguing to me, and I wanted to explore what it truly means in this context. When we say an apartment has character, we're probably referring to some quirky features, especially if those quirks are the result of a tumultuous or involved history. It's about the qualities that make the space unique and not merely superficial ones. Often, these characteristics result from vestiges left over time from a long-lived past, such as well-crafted wood trim details, oddly placed columns, or unique built-in furniture.Most architects, however, wouldn't use the term 'character' in a serious architectural context, mainly because it sounds like an inarguable qualification of personal taste, such as saying, 'I like it because it has character.' While this kind of language may be convincing for selling something, in an academic context or discourse, its imprecision renders it useless for communicating with other scholars. This argument was presented by the theorist Colin Rowe in the 1950s, who wrote an influential essay about why architects shouldn't use the term 'character' anymore. The essay traces how the word had a specific meaning in the past but became so overused and abused that uttering it at this point does more harm than good. Rowe flippantly suggested that all you really need to imbue a building with character is to give it a unique porch, a window, or a chimney. Instead of focusing on character, he believed architects should be more concerned about the deep formal arrangements of a building—its bones and objective qualities, not something as superficial or subjective as character.

However, it wasn't always like this. The idea that buildings could have character was essential in breaking architecture out of a rut in the mid-17th and 18th centuries, especially in France. Architects were facing new challenges as they expanded beyond designing opulent residences, civic, or religious structures, requiring a fresh approach to design and evaluation. During this time, architects and theorists conducted numerous physical and thought experiments to test how buildings might express character. Some argued that different moldings could be likened to face silhouettes extruded, suggesting that just as different faces relate to different personalities, these outlines might translate into building personalities as well. The use of the term 'character' in architecture was deeply linked to literature, with figures like Jermaine Balfour using the term "genre" to categorize buildings based on their style or function, just like we categorize books or movies as sci-fi or western. Beaufriend argued that buildings should express their genre, otherwise they risk offending the natural order of things. This raises questions about the practice of studying precedents and references in contemporary pedagogy, as students are often asked to learn from past architecture's commonalities. But what if a building they are studying defies its expected genre and exhibits unique character? This has implications for defining genres and characters over time but is limited to the design process and offers little in terms of allowing individual buildings to find unique expression or deal with their unique sites or conditions.

After Beaufriend, the theorist Quatermere De Quincy further refined the concept of character, suggesting three distinct ways that buildings could exhibit it: essential, distinctive, and relative. This essay presents each of these ways individually and uses an architect from around Quincy's time to illustrate what he was talking about. Essential character refers to the strong internal constitution and permanence expressed in a building's grandeur and importance. Architecturally, this kind of character is portrayed through permanence, power, and strength, and a building with essential character strikes the spectator with awe and significance. Features associated with essential character are also linked to primitiveness and appear uncorrupted by the complexities of culture, resonating more with nature. Architects like Etienne Louis Boule, who lived from 1728 to 1799, demonstrated the idea of essential character in his visionary speculations, with one notable work being the cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton. The drawing depicts a giant sphere intersected with a disc-shaped base, primitive irreducible forms that symbolize essential character.

The second form of character is distinctive, which is similar to Beaufriend's idea of a building's proper relationship to its genre. Distinctive character is defined as the visible conveyance of an object's purpose and its outward appearance, communicating function or traits that make an object similar to others of the same type. Claude Nicholas Ledoux's architectural works exemplify distinctive character, as he was the government architect for France during this period and constantly imagined new categories of buildings and institutions. For instance, his house of the water surveyor, designed for someone in charge of monitoring water quality for a town, features a doughnut shape allowing the river to flow through for monitoring while also symbolizing surveillance and control. The third way a building can have character is relative character, which Quincy describes as born from making visible certain invisible contextual influences, accidents, and exceptions. It refers to traits that make a thing different from others within the same category, emphasizing originality and individuality. Jean-Jacques Lequeu's unique architecture from this period exemplifies relative character, with his buildings often composed of specific pieces of architecture from history or recognizable animals and objects, such as cows. This can be considered a form of relative character because each building has its own unique quirks and idiosyncrasies, which are just as important, if not more so, than the broad abstract geometries underneath.

character was highly important in a historical context and then evolved to become somewhat meaningless until the 1950s when it was banished entirely. However, some architects are now exploring ways to reintroduce character into the realm of architecture. They range from those reimagining historical categories of character to those inventing new ones. Practices like Bureau Spectacular began their architectural journey by creating comic books as a medium to explore new ways of designing buildings. The comic book allows for the creation of new worlds with their own rules, where architecture can thrive in unconventional ways. By incorporating characters that inhabit or explore the buildings, architects can explore new approaches to how people occupy spaces, and buildings themselves may have thoughts expressed through their shape or posture. This is not entirely new, as practices like Archigram also experimented with comics where buildings walked around. However, it remains an interesting area for firms to explore the idea of character in contemporary architecture.