Current 1 - SURFACES - Finishing as Polishing
The flow of this current leads to questions of Detail via: Material, Tactility and Craft.
"I shall treat of polished finishings and the methods of giving them both beauty and durability."
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture. VII. Preface. Morgan, 201.
As the final treatment of a building’s physical surfaces, finish provides what Adrian Stokes terms “the smooth and the rough.” Finishing can be a physical act, a labor of love, where materials are polished, sanded, painted, drilled, installed, smoothed or roughened with the tools of skilled workers. Building surfaces are sometimes judged superficially, but they remain the tangibly present skin available to the tactile explorations of a building’s inhabitants. Despite being the subject of the entirety of Book VII of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, finishing receives relatively limited scholarly attention.
In the practice of architecture, a satisfactory or “good” surface that completes or concludes the act of making is characterized as a “standard finish.” How much of the good of the finish is the desired end state, and what criteria are occluded in evaluating its performance? To what degree is a finish achieved or realized by a mixture of intentional (human) and unintentional forces (like weathering)?
In dialogue with these concerns, to what degree is the external surface finish of a building inherent to its value, use, or reception? Can ostentatious finishing blind us to design flaws? How is finishing present in the drawings of the architect? What semantic or ontological shifts, if any, take place when a surface is refurbished or refinished? Is it fundamentally changed, or just superficially adjusted, renovated? When we casually talk about surface-level changes, are we being disingenuous? To what degree should we conceive of the tactility of building as a central concern for the architect; more generally, how are finishes related to the embodied experience of space?
Why do craft workers such as stonemasons or painters often receive less credit than patrons or architects? Is a finish regarded more highly when it is “hand-made” as opposed to mechanically produced? Does a focus on finish inevitably lead to Venturi and Scott Brown’s “decorated shed” or can it be a site of resistance?