I’ve only been to Oslo once. It’s a lovely city; I arrived, though, on a winter’s Sunday afternoon. The cold and the habit of Osloers of spending the weekend outside the city meant that there were very few people out and about other than a slightly chilly Brit and a group of protesters outside the Storting. The feeling, watching the paucity of cars and pedestrians, was of a city that had lost a great deal of its population in a past cataclysm and that the remaining inhabitants were too few for the size of the city. As I said, Oslo is a lovely city and it’s easy to walk around, but it felt as if a hundred thousand Norwegians were missing. The following day, a Monday, saw the return of life to the city and made it feel altogether more human.
I’ve had a similar but less pleasant feeling at Westminster tube station. Westminster tube is, for my money, the least human station on the underground. The exposed steel and concrete, marked in places by damp and leaks, gives you the feeling, if you go down its great maw towards the Jubilee line platforms in the early morning, of the human race having become troglodytes after the surface was rendered uninhabitable. It feels like a post-apocalyptic industrial complex built for an army of workers that are turning to dust somewhere. Clearly, it is designed to handle a large throughput of passengers but its open galleries, sheer drops and inhumanly large scale mean that, except during the busiest periods, you feel as if you’re on a Ridley Scott movie set. It is a vertiginous, agoraphobia-inducing and ugly building that makes us feel like ants in a giant formicarium and not people.
I spent last night at Heathrow’s Terminal Five. Although it has avoided the total dehumanisation of Westminster tube in fulfilling its brief to be able to cope with future demand, at night it has a similar feel of emptiness and excessive scale. The massive struts that support the roof are held together by nuts and bolts that wouldn’t look out of place on an oil rig; the cavernous expanse under the roof does make you wonder how many planes would have to take off to empty it. It feels sterile.
I simply wonder if it is not possible to design public buildings that can cope with large numbers of people, both present and expected in the future, that don’t make us feel like an inconvenience to the grand design when relatively quiet.
xD.