Engaging Places joined a minibus tour of the Olympic Park, and as we drove around the site the impression of BIGNESS was experienced in various ways.
How should we distinguish between Bigness – for want of a better word – and that simpler thing which is just a comparative largeness, in the way that a four-storey building is large in comparison with a bungalow?
We could think of Bigness as the impression of size where the impression of size is the thing that seems to matter more than anything else. Or perhaps we could think of it as a particular effect of scale where it’s no longer easy to grasp just how big the thing actually is!
Taking a trip to the Olympic site, this impression of Bigness is one of the first things that you experience. There are lots of reasons for this, but how many of them are about the place’s actual size?
The Tardis effect. The Olympic site is situated on the edge of inner London, in a dense area of housing, small businesses, transport links, municipal buildings, shops and so on. In every direction the city gives the impression of being full of well-established uses taking up every available space. But then when you drive into the site it suddenly opens up, and spreads out in every direction, and seems to reach all the way to the edge of your vision.
Surprise! This connects to the first idea. Not only does the Olympic site seem larger than your vague ideas of the available space, but of course this also means that its scale is hidden away. There is a moment when you suddenly become aware of its massiveness, and then it breaks through the boundaries you have unconsciously surrounded it with, ballooning outwards…
More than you can take in… This quality may not be essential to Bigness but it certainly helps. At the Olympic site the wider London scenery seems to disappear as the boundaries of the Park push outwards in every direction. At the moment when you first get an impression of its large size, you struggle to make a picture of the entire place in your mind. The place seems to exceed your capacities.
Bigness within Bigness. The Olympic Park is a big expanse of space with big objects dotted around inside it. All of the principal venues are large buildings: the Olympic Stadium, the Velodrome, the Aquatics Centre and the Basketball Arena – to list only a few of the more striking objects that circle around you as you tour the Park, exchanging their positions as you are whisked from point to point.
Mystery... Sporting venues are ideally suited to conveying a sense of Bigness because of their lack of windows. With most buildings it’s the windows that give us an idea of their size, telling us about the number of floors and giving us a quick impression of the building’s relationship to the human form. When we look at a building like the Velodrome it isn’t immediately obvious how big it actually is. This effect is exaggerated by the open spaces between the different venues, keeping their distance from the viewer a little ambiguous too.
More mystery… The purpose of many of the buildings at the Olympic site isn’t immediately obvious either, and while this is true of many buildings, usually we can just decide ‘well that’s an office building’ whether or not it actually is. We can make places disappear by giving them quick explanations. At the Olympic site we can’t do this: not only are we pretty convinced that everything has an interesting and unusual purpose, but also we approach places like this with an expectation that every building will be doing something unique. And because a few of the buildings make their purposes very clear we start to expect all the buildings to give us vital clues in their external forms. But in fact most of the buildings don’t reveal their secrets this easily, and this sense of mystery helps with the sense of Bigness. It’s a complementary feeling: something else that you haven’t been able to get a fix on.
Exploring BIGNESS
1. Think about all the ideas above and relate them to a place that you know, and have perhaps become familiar with, but which still captures this feeling of Bigness. Think about all the reasons why it seems to capture this feeling.
2. What are the different ways that you can try to capture the feeling of Bigness? It’s a common experience to take photos of amazing sights – incredible views – and then to be disappointed because somehow the photo fails to capture exactly what it was that you found so impressive. Everything is there but it isn’t the same. Why does this happen?
3. Think of a time when you experienced the feeling of Bigness discussed in this article and try to describe that feeling in one of the following ways:
Using numbers. What are all the different ways that you can describe the place using hard statistics? The actual measurements of a place’s dimensions are only one possibility. You could also think about these ideas: comparative descriptions of physical size (the ‘number of football pitches’ descriptions); the ‘money facts’ that you can discover (like the cost of construction); the ‘people facts’ (the number of visitors, for example); the ‘resource facts’ (all the different things the place uses), and so on…
Using words. Write a description that tries to convey this feeling of Bigness. Your description could focus on the place itself, or on your feelings when you were there, or both…
Using pictures. Artists use many different methods to try to convey an impression of enormous scale. Showing human figures dwarfed by the object or place in question. Showing only a small part of the object – with the rest disappearing beyond the frame and into our imaginations. Choosing a part of the object that will suggest its Bigness particularly strongly (something which is usually small), and so on… Explore these and other ways to show Bigness in pictures.
The Velodrome at the Olympic Park in London. Copyright ODA 2008.
We could think of Bigness as the impression of size where the impression of size is the thing that seems to matter more than anything else. Or perhaps we could think of it as a particular effect of scale where it’s no longer easy to grasp just how big the thing actually is!
Taking a trip to the Olympic site, this impression of Bigness is one of the first things that you experience. There are lots of reasons for this, but how many of them are about the place’s actual size?
The Tardis effect. The Olympic site is situated on the edge of inner London, in a dense area of housing, small businesses, transport links, municipal buildings, shops and so on. In every direction the city gives the impression of being full of well-established uses taking up every available space. But then when you drive into the site it suddenly opens up, and spreads out in every direction, and seems to reach all the way to the edge of your vision.
Surprise! This connects to the first idea. Not only does the Olympic site seem larger than your vague ideas of the available space, but of course this also means that its scale is hidden away. There is a moment when you suddenly become aware of its massiveness, and then it breaks through the boundaries you have unconsciously surrounded it with, ballooning outwards…
More than you can take in… This quality may not be essential to Bigness but it certainly helps. At the Olympic site the wider London scenery seems to disappear as the boundaries of the Park push outwards in every direction. At the moment when you first get an impression of its large size, you struggle to make a picture of the entire place in your mind. The place seems to exceed your capacities.
Bigness within Bigness. The Olympic Park is a big expanse of space with big objects dotted around inside it. All of the principal venues are large buildings: the Olympic Stadium, the Velodrome, the Aquatics Centre and the Basketball Arena – to list only a few of the more striking objects that circle around you as you tour the Park, exchanging their positions as you are whisked from point to point.
Mystery... Sporting venues are ideally suited to conveying a sense of Bigness because of their lack of windows. With most buildings it’s the windows that give us an idea of their size, telling us about the number of floors and giving us a quick impression of the building’s relationship to the human form. When we look at a building like the Velodrome it isn’t immediately obvious how big it actually is. This effect is exaggerated by the open spaces between the different venues, keeping their distance from the viewer a little ambiguous too.
More mystery… The purpose of many of the buildings at the Olympic site isn’t immediately obvious either, and while this is true of many buildings, usually we can just decide ‘well that’s an office building’ whether or not it actually is. We can make places disappear by giving them quick explanations. At the Olympic site we can’t do this: not only are we pretty convinced that everything has an interesting and unusual purpose, but also we approach places like this with an expectation that every building will be doing something unique. And because a few of the buildings make their purposes very clear we start to expect all the buildings to give us vital clues in their external forms. But in fact most of the buildings don’t reveal their secrets this easily, and this sense of mystery helps with the sense of Bigness. It’s a complementary feeling: something else that you haven’t been able to get a fix on.
The Basketball Arena in Stratford, London. By Martin Deutsch via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
1. Think about all the ideas above and relate them to a place that you know, and have perhaps become familiar with, but which still captures this feeling of Bigness. Think about all the reasons why it seems to capture this feeling.
2. What are the different ways that you can try to capture the feeling of Bigness? It’s a common experience to take photos of amazing sights – incredible views – and then to be disappointed because somehow the photo fails to capture exactly what it was that you found so impressive. Everything is there but it isn’t the same. Why does this happen?
3. Think of a time when you experienced the feeling of Bigness discussed in this article and try to describe that feeling in one of the following ways:
Using numbers. What are all the different ways that you can describe the place using hard statistics? The actual measurements of a place’s dimensions are only one possibility. You could also think about these ideas: comparative descriptions of physical size (the ‘number of football pitches’ descriptions); the ‘money facts’ that you can discover (like the cost of construction); the ‘people facts’ (the number of visitors, for example); the ‘resource facts’ (all the different things the place uses), and so on…
Using words. Write a description that tries to convey this feeling of Bigness. Your description could focus on the place itself, or on your feelings when you were there, or both…
Using pictures. Artists use many different methods to try to convey an impression of enormous scale. Showing human figures dwarfed by the object or place in question. Showing only a small part of the object – with the rest disappearing beyond the frame and into our imaginations. Choosing a part of the object that will suggest its Bigness particularly strongly (something which is usually small), and so on… Explore these and other ways to show Bigness in pictures.
