How Architecture and Design Inspire Creativity

Creating the Space for people to dream, make, and do.

Architecture influences how people feel, think, and behave because it is a design and an expression that inspires a culture of creativity and allows people to interact in meaningful ways.

It speaks a global language that everyone can understand regardless of their native language and cultural identity. It can affect how art is made, experienced, and act as a catalyst for social integration and collaboration.

Creativity inspires urban development, which lures bohemians and artists with the attraction of being exposed to innovative ideas. A collective ecosystem made up of dreamers, makers, and doers with distinct values, attitudes, and feelings learned and transmitted from each generation providing people with a sense of escapism, freedom, and hope to self-actualization and live a fulfilled life.

Six perspectives for how architecture and design has transformed peoples lives and moved society forward:

1 Chaos to Culture

Architecture influences how people feel, think, and behave because it is a design and an expression that inspires a culture of creativity and allows people to interact in meaningful ways. Setting the right conditions, atmosphere, and environment inspires creativity, art, and beauty that people adapt and react to and reflect in their life and work. It affects how they view and interpret the world around them, their capacity to self-actualization, and their ability to live fulfilled and happy lives.

The Guggenheim, New York City. Photograph by Roy Sharples

2 Time, Place, Occasion

Music venues like; The Cavern Club in Liverpool became an epicenter for Merseybeat in the 1960s. The Troubadour in Los Angeles for folk music in the 1960s and 1970s. CBGBs in New York City, and the 100 Club in London for punk in the 1970s. The Wigan Casino for northern soul 1970s. In Manchester, the Haçienda nightclub for acid house, rave music, and the “Madchester” scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These venues became synonymous with the music they hosted. A sanctuary where music, fashion, and culture came together to provide people in a social movement with a sense of escapism, freedom, and hope.

Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow. Photograph by Roy Sharples

3 Utopian Futures

Modernist architecture pioneer Le Corbusier reinvented industrial housing into tenement buildings that mirrored streets at ground level and maximized space. Stanley Kubrick used these principles in his movie “A Clockwork Orange” to create a futuristic world. As did Park Hill, a public housing estate in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, inspired by Le Corbusier's "Streets in the Sky," the spirit captured sonically within some of the early recordings of the city’s local synth-pop band The Human League. Hulme Crescents in Manchester and Quarry Hill Estate in Leeds are similar. Brutalism followed the modernist blueprint, where form followed function to design buildings that resembled what they are, such as the Barbican in London, which is one of the finest manifestations of the Brutalist utopian style for inner-city living. Another architectural and design marvel of industrial Britain was the magnificent art deco styled Battersea Power Station that dominated the London skyline for generations and an endless source of inspiration for many music videos, films, and television programs.

Space Needle, Seattle. Photograph by Roy Sharples.

4 Anxiety in Overdrive

The Bauhaus movement's primary artistic ideology was to use art synergistically to revolutionize Germany's architecture through creativity and modernity based on a minimalist approach with clean lines and shapes, smooth, gentle curves, and bold, simple coloration. Bauhaus stood for the anxieties about modern manufacturing's soullessness and the fear that art was losing social relevance. It also worked to reunite fine art and functional design, creating practical objects with a soul.

Trellick Tower, London.

5 A Place Called Space

Frank Lloyd Wright built an architecture that represented the vast American landscape's unique identity, its diversity of people, and its democratic ideals of freedom through his organic architectural design. Form followed function where the building, furnishings, environment, and surroundings became part of a unified and interrelated composition. This was most famously manifested in "Fallingwater," a design from which its inhabitants could see, hear, and feel nature “unfolding like an organism from the seed within” which it exists in the "continuous present" to fulfill social, physical, and spiritual needs.

Fallingwater by Roy Sharples.

6 Elegance And All That Jazz

The art nouveau and art deco styled Glaswegian architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh put Scotland on the architectural map as a center for creativity for art and design manifested through his re-design of the Glasgow School of Art. It became one of the leading decorative arts and architecture schools in Europe. He infused materials and techniques such as repoussé metalwork, silver-smithing, enamelwork, wrought iron, carved wood, and stained glass with distinctly serene designs. Symbolist architectural style with Japanism’s restraint and minimalism, and floral motifs, rigorously designed to the last detail. Another architectural staple is the cantilever trussed Forth Bridge that crosses Scotland’s Firth of Forth estuary.

Forth Bridge, Scotland

Watch the short movie "Architecture and Design Influence Creativity"

Filmed by Iain Mutch at Walkerandwilliam studio.

Narrative and Voice by Roy Sharples.

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Creators

Roy Sharples

Founder and CEO of Unknown Origins, a creative studio on a mission to save the world from unoriginality by unleashing the power of creativity. Author of "Creativity Without Frontiers: How to make the invisible visible by lighting the way into the future."

Photo credit Brian Smale

Iain Mutch

Filmographer, musician and founder of Walkerandwilliam studio. Iain is a maker, doer, and journeyman - driven by an insatiable intellectual curiosity, passion, and a thirst for experiential creative pursuits, expanding into disparate topics, experimentation, tinkering, and deepening his subject-matter expertise across time and space.

https://iainno9.wixsite.com/website

Attitude. Imagination. Execution.

www.unknownorigins.com

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