Text Clips
Food for Thought . . .
"Call them squares, piazze, places or platze, the essential elements of success are those of a sense of enclosure and pleasant usefulness."
"Utility, integrity and delight"
If most squares can be thought of as gigantic rooms, it is no surprise that, in describing their shape and proportion, we often speak of walls, floor and furnishing."
(Gatje, _Great Public Spaces _)
"Public spaces must be viewed in three dimensions, as volumes carved out of the solid of the built fabric."
The public place is . . . a purpose-built stage for ritual and interaction . . . it is the canvas on which political and social change is painted."
(Spiro Kostof, _The City Shaped_, 138, 123-4)
"Conceived over time this way, the site has three distinct areas. The first, most obvious one, is the area of control, easy to trace in the property lines designating legal metes and bounds. The second, encompassing forces that act on a plot without being confined to it, can be called the area of influence. Third is the area of effect--the domain impacted following design action. These three areas overlap despite their different geographies and temporalities."
(Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn, "Introduction," Site Matters, Burns and Kahn, ed., London: Routledge, 2005, xii)
"Sometimes the most important aspect of a given site is almost intangible. It is not necessarily what remains visible to the eye that matters most, but those forces and events that undergird the evolution of a place."
"I am interested in how one recognizes sites through design, especially in reaction to the general state of environmental and cultural amnesia that characterizes our time."
(Christophe Girot, "Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture," in Recovering Landscape, James Corner, ed. Princeton, 1999, 63, 59)
"[P]lots are not empty canvases, but full spaces, full of nature and history, whose latent forms and meanings can be surfaced, and made palpable, through design."
(Elizabeth Meyer, "Site Citations," in Site Matters, 102)
from our reader:
in the news . . .
re: Lynch's concept of "wayfinding:"
When Everything is Gone, Including a Sense of Direction
By Dan Barry, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and A.G. Sulzberger, 5/28/11 NYT The tornado that carved through southwetern Missouri last Sunday leveld parts of Joplin so completely that the community's inner GPS remains out of whack.
Is GPS All in our Heads? NYT 2/2/12
Cairo Journal
Penned-In Egyptians Find Peace in City’s Din
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
NYT, June 18, 2009
Space is tight in Cairo, so residents often head to bridges and other public places for a bit of contemplation.
New York Region
Tourists and New Yorkers Take a Rubber Seat in Times Square
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
NYT, June 11, 2009
A fleet of 376 rubber folding chairs and loungers has arrived in Times Square, and while Mayor Michael Bloomberg is skeptical, weary tourists have rushed to fill the seats.
Architecture Review | Nicolai Ouroussoff, Kogod
Courtyard
A Delicate Glass Roof With Links to the Past , NYT, November 19, 2007
Norman Foster’s renovation shows how an architect can respect the past
without dressing it up in historicist frippery.
"Farming and development have swallowed more than half of the original Everglades, Abby Goodnough, "Effort to Save Everglades Falters as Funds Drop," New York Times, November 2, 2007
In contrast with Kevin Lynch's empahsis on good city form, "an exhibition opening today at the Municipal Art Society reminds us [that] Jane Jacobs did not believe that planners could ever restore life to American cities." Jane Jacobs, Foe of Plans and Friend of City Life, New York Times, September 25, 2007.
"Recent events at St. Peter's Square, in Rome, have demonstrated, among other things, the virtues of a piazza. Three million people entered Rome in the course of about five days, and almost all of them came to the piazza outside the basilica. Bernini, the pizzza's main architect, conceived the square (which is actually oval) in the seventeenth century as a site of pilgrimage, although he might not have imagined what could happen when Christian zeal is combined with mass tourism. Nevertheless, apart from a few minor incidents, everyone in the square behaved. For the people waiting outside it, in a line to view Pope John Paul II's body which stretched form more than three miles, the arms of Bernini's great flanking colonnades were ahead, like a big stone hug ready to enfold pilgrims and sightseers alike at the end of their ordeal."
(John Seabrook, "Roman Renovation: Can Richard Meier Undo What Augustus and Mussolini Wrought?" The New Yorker, May 2, 2005, 56)
cf: "Bernini himself compared the colonnades to the motherly arms of the Church 'which embrace Catholics to reinforce their belief, heretics to re-unite them with the Church, and agnostics to enlighten them with the true faith."
(Course Reader 16/Wittkower, Art and Archit. of Italy, 35)
"'People don't know until something like this (Hurricane Katrina) comes along how much the shape of their house, the texture of their house, the mood of their neighborhood, are important parts of who they are,' said Kai Erikson, a sociologist at Yale. 'People take all of this so much for granted that when they return and the house is gone or not habitable it disorients them, makes them more lonely and more afraid, and they don't know why. This is true of public spaces and streets too,' Dr. Erikson continued. 'You have no idea how much they mean to you untl they are gone or permanently altered.'"(Benedict Carey, "Storm Will Have Long-Term Emotional Effect on Some, Experts Say," New York Times, Sunday September 4, 2005)