Transcript: The Comfort ZoneHost: Alan SaundersGuests: Rebecca Maxwell & Peter-John Cantrill Aired on 6 November 2004, Radio National Alan Saunders: Hello, I`m Alan Saunders, and this is The Comfort Zone. This week we`re looking at the senses, and notice how as soon as I try to tell you what we`re doing, a sensory metaphor obtrudes. We`re looking at the senses, not tasting them, or smelling them, not even hearing them, even though this is radio. Well very shortly we`ll find out whether our bias towards the visual has impoverished our view {here we go again, our view} of architecture. We`ll take a trip round the garden, that unlike most other gardens is dedicated to what you can touch, taste, hear and smell, as well as to what you can see. We`ll also find out about textures in the food of Malaysia, the crunchy versus the smooth, and also, more surprisingly perhaps, the texture of wine in the latest of our monthly wine chats. But getting back to that ocular bias: it`s surely nowhere more evident than in contemporary architecture, where appearances seem to mean everything. Shortly, I`ll be speaking to an architect about how his profession can even things up a bit, so that our experience of the world we build around us becomes a truly multi-sensory one. But first, we thought it might be valuable to understand what kind of experience architecture offers to someone without sight. In a world were buildings are predominantly judged by what they look like, how does someone without sight measure whether a building is a good one or a bad one? So I spoke to Rebecca Maxwell, a writer and former teacher who lives in Melbourne and who lost her sight at the age of three. And I began by remarking to her that if I were to describe a building, my description would start with what it looks like. So how would Rebecca`s description start? Rebecca Maxwell: I think I`d start with the floor plan. It`s very important to me to be able to internalise the being of that building. I don`t just happen from space to space; any building I`m going to familiarise myself with has to be in an internal map, and really, if I were to give you a parallel experience, I could ask you to close your eyes and put yourself in your bedroom at night, and then imagine the layout of your house, and you would have a spatial experience I think. Alan Saunders: How do you get a sense of the floor plan? Does this mean that you have to walk the perimeters? Rebecca Maxwell: Probably I wouldn`t say the perimeters, because I probably wouldn`t circumnavigate every room, but I`d begin with let`s say the final column, the skeleton of the building, so it would be the hallways and how spaces radiate from that, and then I`d do the second level of enriching my inner map, and that would mean getting a sense of each of the rooms. And that then goes beyond the floor plan. It also becomes a sense of the three dimensions of the room, and where there are places that let in the outside, that actually brings a space to life. If I can feel the air or the presence of balcony or garden, or whatever. Alan Saunders: Now you talk about getting a more three dimensional sense. Like a lot of people I think given a choice, I prefer high ceilings to low ceiling
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