"You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us"
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Mayne isn’t taking a swipe at reverence so much as demoting it. The phrase “honorific space” sounds like the kind of label institutions love: a building as credential, a monument as moral alibi. You can “enter” that idea instantly, the way you enter a brand narrative. But he’s warning that symbolic status is cheap compared to what architecture actually does to a body in motion. His pivot - “but that’s something totally different than experiencing it” - is a blunt reset: stop treating buildings as statements and start treating them as situations.
The subtext is a quiet critique of architecture-as-image, a culture where renderings, awards, and civic ribbon-cuttings stand in for lived reality. Mayne, a figure associated with aggressive forms and high-intensity urban projects, is staking a claim for phenomenology without saying the academic word. “Experience comes first” reads like a design ethic and a political one: the real power of a space isn’t its intended meaning but its effects - how it funnels people, holds them, disorients them, dignifies them, exhausts them.
“And that has the deepest effect on us” lands as both promise and warning. Architecture is not neutral backdrop; it’s a behavioral technology. If you design for honorific symbolism, you get compliance and distance. If you design for experience, you’re shaping memory, emotion, even social relationships - the stuff that outlasts the plaque on the wall.
The subtext is a quiet critique of architecture-as-image, a culture where renderings, awards, and civic ribbon-cuttings stand in for lived reality. Mayne, a figure associated with aggressive forms and high-intensity urban projects, is staking a claim for phenomenology without saying the academic word. “Experience comes first” reads like a design ethic and a political one: the real power of a space isn’t its intended meaning but its effects - how it funnels people, holds them, disorients them, dignifies them, exhausts them.
“And that has the deepest effect on us” lands as both promise and warning. Architecture is not neutral backdrop; it’s a behavioral technology. If you design for honorific symbolism, you get compliance and distance. If you design for experience, you’re shaping memory, emotion, even social relationships - the stuff that outlasts the plaque on the wall.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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