We can look at the world as our given reality, or look at it as a semi-blank canvas, still waiting to be painted. One of the best sources of human potential lies in a surprising capability: our imagination. We’re constantly hearing about investments in technology and research but, as crucial to society as those areas are, they are the means and not the origin of the amazing process that is human development.
One of the best sources of human potential lies in a surprising capability: our imagination.
This is easy to see when we trace back every invention, every achievement, every calamity and every project undertaken by humankind… they all started with just an idea. Whether our minds work according to what we perceive in our environment or the other way around is an endless ontological debate: what is? Discussions about the subject go all the way back to the very birth of philosophy.
ArrayWe could say that our thoughts hold the ultimate truth. Plato argued with the existence of a world of ideas, of true forms that live in an ethereal world of which we see only imperfect physical copies. Most Christian philosophers, as well as field-defining figures like Inmanuel Kant, ascribed to similar variations of this type of theory about perception.
Plato argued with the existence of a world of ideas, of true forms that live in an ethereal world of which we see only imperfect physical copies.
On the other hand, we can agree with the empirical side of the debate. Our ideas are only the way we have of coping with the randomness of the world, and that our minds simply reflect, distort, or simplify what we perceive through our senses. Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke, to name a few, all defended this type of scientific rationalism.
But whether we see our surroundings from an idealistic or an empirical point of view, what is clear is that our psyche and our perception of the world have a very complex relationship in which both parties are locked like a snake biting its tail. We see, touch, hear, smell, and feel things that trigger thoughts about them, and those thoughts, in turn, change our perception of the world little by little… from the day we are born, we are constantly feeding this loop of thought and perception.
From the day we are born, we are constantly feeding this loop of thought and perception.
Every now and again, however, an idea shoots out of that cycle and makes an indentation in the fabric of our world… a real, tangible product. An activity as banal as watching insects take flight prompted Da Vinci to sketch an early man-powered version of the helicopter; this blueprint, in turn, served to inspire a chain of people until Igor Sikorsky finally designed the first helicopter to take flight in 1939.
ArrayWhen Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon or Georges Méliès’s A trip to the moon film was produced, no one thought their vision was more than a fantasy; the idea of space travel, however, has seen incredible amounts of effort invested into it… and the results are working rockets that bear a striking resemblance to those early sketches of what could someday be. Aeroplanes, self-driving cars, devices that are unlocked with fingerprints, holograms, submarines, trips to the moon… the visions imagined for our entertainment tend to slowly make their way into our reality.
Because, in most cases, an idea is just enough. Our incredible capacity of invention needs just a seed in order to start a chain reaction of ambition and enthusiasm that, more often than not, ends with the realisation of what we thought was impossible. But not all transcriptions from imagination to reality need to be age-defying achievements. On a daily basis, we are constantly shaping our world with objects, buildings, and interactions. It is a great gift that, as far as we know, only our species has. We are capable of making a reality out of something that originally existed only in our minds.
If we look around us carefully, we can see how our cities are living examples of this ability to shape our world by imagining a new one. Skyscrapers, elevators, impossible bridges, hanging structures… In London, we have a peculiar example of how a more recent desire to see a world popularised by fiction influences the lives of thousands of people every day: Westminster Underground Station. Upon entering the buzzing transportation hub, we are faced with an open maze of escalators that endlessly cross exposed structural elements and each other.
The long streamlined path takes us away from the gothic surroundings of the surface and brings us deep into one of the largest holes to ever be carved out of London. On our descent, we cross gigantic steel structures that sometimes feel so close we can barely resist the impulse to duck as we glide on the escalators under them. We leave behind beams, pipes, and pillars, so wide five people together could not embrace them… suddenly, we feel like we are in a different world, a world we have seen before on the screen. As we look closer at the concrete and shiny metal accents the feeling of strange familiarity is enhanced: the sense of being in a world like the one we have encountered countless times in late 20th century sci-fi popular culture.
ArrayArchitecture, very often, takes cues from everyday sources of inspiration like films, books, or comics- the aesthetic from Blade Runner (1982), Things to Come (1936), and even the Star Wars saga, come to mind in the case of Westminster Station. The architecture of the underground station brings those imagined worlds to life by drawing inspiration from their aesthetic, from the way they make us feel when we see them in films or read about them in books. And when that inspiration becomes a built reality, a whole world that existed only in our imaginations casts a tangible shadow in the real world, much like in Plato’s allegory of the cave.
The architecture of the underground station brings those imagined worlds to life by drawing inspiration from their aesthetic…
The difference with Plato’s suggestion is that, in his version, we see only the shadows of reality because we can’t engage with a deeper philosophical realm. But in this instance we are in control. It is a beautiful realisation to discover that we have the power to cast those shadows, and not just to ponder at them wishing we could see the world outside the cave. When it comes to architecture, the world outside the cave -the one inside our minds- is not a parallel universe to the one we live in; it is just a precedent.
The station was designed by Hopkins Architects and opened in the year 1999. Following other examples of avant-garde architecture inspired by Archigram´s wonderfully improbable designs of steel tubes and walking-cities and of dreams of streamlined spaceships in silvery future worlds, the architects proposed a reality out of what had previously only existed in drawings and film sets.
And the result is wonderful, making a journey on the London tube feel sometimes like a journey through time, rather than through space. It is a marker of how our imagination can influence reality as much as reality informs the former. Westminster Station is a materialisation of the predictions made twenty years ago about what the future- that is, our present- would look like. A fun reminder that, sometimes, human-powers are more impressive than super-powers; that we have the ability to shape the future through the things we imagine for it in the present.
