Architects are notorious for looking downwards, thinking and designing in plan. We’d argue that raising your eyeline and seeing things in section can transform the way you experience a place.

No great building was ever made by looking at the floor. But this is exactly what we tend to do: most people stare at the ground when they walk. Looking down reduces our field of view, compresses the chest and we begin to feel the weight of the world on our shoulders. The answer, according to social media, is to reset our posture with breathing exercises, meditation. But I think the answer’s simpler than that. You just need to look up.

 

Looking up and seeing the sky improves your mood instantly. You breathe deeper, you take in what’s around you. What you see might be nature’s architecture, or it could be a great building. One of my favourites – La Chiesa dell’Autostrada del Sole in Florence, by Giovanni Michelucci – makes you look up in a very clever and unexpected way. As you enter the church you follow a long narrow corridor with a low ceiling. It makes you stare at the floor. At the end of the corridor you turn right and walk into the nave. Nave means ship in Italian and the volume of the colossal hull above you forces you to look up. You have no option to do otherwise.

 

The church, built in 1964, is a symbolic structure because it remembers the 164 workers that lost their lives building the adjacent motorway. It’s also an amazing building. You look up and see the crushing weight of the concrete above your ahead, but appears as light as a sheet on a washing line. It makes you tilt your head back and stare upwards.

 

And that’s what great architecture is all about. There’s a maxim in our studio that every building should have an atrium, and there’s a reason for that. Every piece of architecture, however modest, should make you look up from the floor.