A UNESCO Secreteriat – Joseph Williamson

UNESCO is a fantastic organisation, and it has been a pleasure to work on a project that interprets their values towards cultural outreach. To design a building that illicits an emotional response is a challenge, to paraphrase Georges Braque,

‘I couldn’t portray a [building] in all her loveliness… I haven’t the skill. No one has. I must therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume, of line, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression.’

By this standard, it is impossible to impart a human personality into a building, but it is perhaps possible to impart an architectural personality upon the built environment, in much the same way that one applies a sentimental personality to the pencil that one uses every day, or the stovetop coffee maker that will get your morning started. A building should insert itself into that routine-based sentimentality, so that every commute that passes it should hold a new conversation and an accumulative sense of familiarity between object and observer. I mention the word “conversation”, and it is important to make a distinction here between human and architectural conversation. There is no small talk in architectural conversation, the human in the conversation exists to ask questions, and the architecture can either answer them or not. However, this form of conversation relates to human conversation in the way that over time and as a relationship builds between the two, each will begin to know each other well, and each time they meet will hold a different story. This is the kind of architectural experience that the proposal aims to fulfill.