Gifting

The new topic for Project four is 'Gifting'. We discussed the idea of 'gifting', what is it? When and where more specifically, is it done? Gifting presents, to giving the gift of knowledge, or even life through birth, or saving another life. Even moreso, sacrificing your life for another.

But what was more important is to relate these ideas to architecture. What does a building gift to us? How does it provide us with the means to gift, to encourage the idea of gifting and sharing? Although of course in a more indirect and subtle manner, architecture can give us protection and security, freedom, or even the direct opposite (think prisons, courtrooms etc). This is all part of what we discussed today.

Architecture also provides the means for humans to give and gift. A meeting room, an exhibition space, a lecture hall, a classroom, all these different types of architecture and predetermined for their own specific purposes in function to be optimal for gifting of knowledge, creative skill etc. If we dive deeper we can analyze what about these rooms encourages that gifting: the arrangement of tables in a classroom, the form of the interior as the result of acoustics in a lecture hall, the subtle forceful direction and implication of the corridors and attention brought to a piece of art in an exhibition. One thing that largely fascinated me was light. The amount of light in a room can receive different reactions of mood from humans, just as the colour of the light can invoke various emotions. Dim, artifical lighting sets the mood for the exchange of romance and love; bright natural sunlight promotes gifting of knowledge.

Of course the gift of light, is like the gift of vision to a blind man.



The gift of light:

The small canadian town of Inuvik goes through several weeks a year without any sunlight. Children still attend school at night, people still shop for their groceries, and the routine of a normal sunny day is still imposed. The american juice company Tropicana gifted a large artifical helium sphere of light to the people of Inuvik, along with 1200 bottles of free juice. The sphere acted as a small sun to the town, and was created in time to celebrate the sunrise festival which celebrates the return of the sun after the short period of continuous night.