Identity: What Lies Beneath Style and Form
Metaphorically, we see the entryway as a portal into an individual’s sense of identity and belonging. The very nature of crossing a threshold is an assertion of identity in time and place. However, like a revolving door, identity is unique, always in flux, and comprised of innumerable internal and external experiences.
In essence, people can’t help but attach meaningful associations to these places, which have left the deepest impressions, for better or worse. Such places are the havens we return to again and again, in body and in mind, throughout our lives.
The Berkeley Women’s Club serves as a moment in architecture where issues of identity were paramount to its creation at a time when women felt invisible and excluded from their communities.Simply put, the building allowed for women to have their very own private space to gather and work on social justice issues, without having to make concessions and borrow a meeting space from the “boys”. From the beginning, the club was intended to be a place for everyone, yet to the women who envisioned it; they had the privilege to claim it as theirs.
In post-revolutionary Havana, Fidel Castro conceived the Coppelia ice cream shop as a place for all Cubans. As a massive, modernist structure in the center of the city, Coppelia welcomes habaneros from all backgrounds to enjoy an inexpensive bowl of award-winning ice cream. The building lacks a door, which is a design decision that aligns with the communist ideals that characterized Cuba when Coppelia was built. The ice cream emporium also serves a prime example of Cuba’s national architectural style. Although modernist, the structure references many aspects of traditional Cuban architecture and demonstrates a long history of climatic adaptation in the built Caribbean landscape. In both form and function, Coppelia is thoroughly Cuban.
Lastly, American Moorish Revival Architecture is a style born of several cultural interactions. From the Moorish conquests of Spain, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, to early American Christians, and plantation owners of the deep South, this style has been molded to fit whatever cultural context it found its way into. Thus, the Moorish Revival Architectures of the United States are manifestations of multiple identities and those identities had unique impacts upon the buildings they are now housed in.
To welcome someone into a built environment is to welcome them into a physically manifested form of an identity. Therefore, to understand an architectural space, one must learn of the identities that brought it into being.
