My favourite part of European architecture is that many intersections are not your typical 90° corners, and so as a result neither are the buildings on those corners. Building corners meet at acute and obtuse angles, or they truncate the corners to round them. I enjoy the visual experience of seeing buildings that are not lined up as if they can only be part of endless rows of boxes, rectangles and squares and more rectangles.
They also sit on uneven pavement with buildings meeting the ground at unique angles. Level the ground first? No! Just have more building protruding on one side. Match the building next door? No! Every building can have its’ own style. Match the footprints of the front face of the buildings? No! Put an alcove here, a protruding pillar there and break up the tidy rows.
Add beautiful facades and amazing heritage buildings that have been around longer than Canada has been a country, and the architecture here is just stunning. But more than anything else, it’s the lack of 90° that appeals to me. In Canada and the US we need to think about spicing up our angles.
Photo location: Biarritz, France.
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And just for fun, me being the only person to get drenched at a beech lookout:
Soaked. pic.twitter.com/4DkRDh2ATA
— Dᴀᴠɪᴅ Tʀᴜss ∞β (@datruss) December 30, 2022
And a family photo:
A comment shared by Al Lauzon on Facebook, worthy of sharing here:
Great pictures and reflections. Guess the architects of yore were quite capable of thinking and designing outside the proverbial box. I think architecture is reflective of cultural values. I think in NA the challenge is functionality dominates aesthetics; we have lost both the importance and sense of beauty.