Anne-apolis

  As a child, one is often told: "don't touch" and not just for our own safety with hot stoves and live electrical points, but when in the supermarket and in other people's houses. This sense of touch then becomes far less developed than our sense of sight and hearing, and is often completely sidelined in architectural design. To replace this, the 'visual texture' of objects and materials becomes part of the design repertoire, especially to enrich our spatial experience. Modernism, especially between 1920 and 19960, tended to suppress texture in favour of smooth finishes that evoked the 'machine aesthetic', but gradually, a wide variety of textures has been reintroduced into the language of design, through the reawakening of interest in traditional crafts as well as through new technologies that produce a variety of surface treatments, such as brushed metals. Everything in a Modernist space will both look and feel smooth, texture being the 'look...