On the Architecture of Daylight

A week inside the new civic atrium at Holborn, and what its quiet, almost ceremonial emptiness suggests about how we want to live next.

The first time I walked into the Holborn atrium it was a Tuesday morning, just after the rain, and the entire eight-story hall was so still that I could hear the ventilation as a kind of distant tide. There were perhaps forty people inside a room built for two thousand. None of them were hurrying. It felt less like a public building than a held breath.

I went back four mornings in a row. By the end of the week I had stopped trying to write about the architecture and started writing about the people in it — how they slowed, how they spoke more softly, how they sat one bench apart instead of crowding the same one. Whatever the engineers measured in the foyer's glass and Lucite, the building was measuring us back.

II. The case against ornament, fifty years on

We were promised, somewhere around 1986, that buildings like this would never get built again — that the white-plaster idealism of the interwar moderns had finally been laughed out of the room. And yet Holborn exists, and so does the new transit hall in Lyon, and the civic court in Sapporo. The argument has quietly come back, and this time it is not about taste. It is about attention.