“…I think we’ll do out to dinner or something.”

“So, how did the interview go?”

“Great, really great…”

That’s all I heard, just that fragment of gentle chatter, because I glided down the Q Street escalator out of earshot.

Michael—I know his name because he wears it on his shirt, beneath the safety-yellow vest –hands out the Post Express every morning at the Metro entrance. As one of the last remaining home delivery subscribers, I carry my paper with me and rarely take one from him, but we always greet each other with a “good morning” or some comment about the weather.  Michael is one of my stranger friends, or more accurately he is a stranger-friend.  (I do have some strange friends, but in this case stranger is a noun and not an adjective.) He was chatting with a young woman at the top of the Metro entrance, and it was clearly a follow-up to a previous conversation.  She had told him about an interview; he remembered to ask about it.  It went great! There's a dinner she's mulling with someone. They probably chat on this spot regularly, perhaps accompanied by a hand-off of free news.

He falls into a category similar to the “familiar stranger,” a relationship first described in 1972 by a psychologist named Stanley Milgram. A research project devoted to this subject at UC Berkeley describes this relationship as so predictable that we notice if our familiar strangers are not where they are supposed to be. Michael went on vacation for two weeks in August and he made sure to tell his regulars.  He knew they would notice his absence. But  Milgram’s familiar stranger is slightly different; it's someone we see regularly but with whom we do not interact.

That’s not the relationship I have with Michael. We do interact, as he interacts with all the Q Street regulars, like the woman with the successful interview. I have a lot of stranger-friends, some closer than others.  The thin woman with the tiny dog.  The shopkeeper at the corner.   He's a close stranger-friend.  I owed him 9 cents for about a week after dumping all my spare change out on the counter to pay for a half-gallon of milk.  He knew I was good for it because I’m a regular.  I’m his stranger-friend. 

My Old Town Alexandria neighborhood is full of stranger-friends, and some familiar strangers.  Sometimes they come in pairs, one of each.  At least three times a week I pass a couple—and I do notice when it’s only one of them—heading to west on Prince Street in the mornings when I’m walking east.  He never nods or smiles at me but she always does.  Sometimes when I see her walking alone I’m tempted to ask, what’s with him?  But that would be a breach of stranger-friend protocol.

The city is constructed on these fine-grained relationships.  They take place on the sidewalks, at the thresholds, on the bus.  More than taking place, though, they actually make place.  Stranger-friendships can only happen in the public realm, a crucial ingredient for a healthy and lovable city. Like the inhabitants of Erisilia, one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, we are all connected by a network of strings of varying density and strength.

An Urbiphile at the Beach

It’s 5pm and people are packing up their bags, putting on their shoes and tugging over-stimulated little ones away from the shoreline after a fun day at the beach.  Noise follows them down the ramp and out as they walk west straight into the sun. The visitors leave and a tangible sense of emptiness remains as the staff tidies the skew chairs and tables. 

 

I have a unique perspective on this familiar summer scene: from the 4^th floor of the National Building Museum I can look down on The Beach. I appreciate that even the sun cooperates in this surreal fiction, this constructed metaphor, that has taken over two thirds of the Museum’s Great Hall. There are few things as entertaining as humans at play, whether in a city or at a metaphorical beach, and I will get this view all summer until Labor Day.

Last summer when we had The BIG MAZE I didn’t gaze down at it, as clever and lovely as it was, and long for a chance to be in it in the early morning or after hours when everyone was gone.  I do, however, find myself feeling that way about The Beach, the simultaneously serene and comical installation designed by Snarkitecture for the Museum this summer. 

The metaphor works, right down to the mirror at the horizon.  The joy of a metaphor is in teetering on the ridge between is and is not. This is/is not a beach. It’s a Beach. A “beach.”  It’s only been open since July 1, but already the sustain pedal of metaphor is pressed to the floor:  people sit at the shoreline or on the pier with just their feet “in”; they say “let’s go in” or “it’s time to come out.” The sound of the balls is eerily close to the sound of waves.  We are deeply attracted to edges, especially the water’s edge, where we either hesitate in fear or jump in.  

There’s humor in it of course—it’s wildly hilarious fun in there-- but beneath is a current of contemplation and, if you let your mind go there, provocation.  We are charmed by this pale translucent ocean of plastic but should be sobered by the thought of real plastic in the real ocean.  We are reassured by the fact that this ocean is only waist deep, but can feel a little terror of metaphorical drowning. Just outside of the Beach the exhibition Designing for Disaster shows us the real thing, and it’s neither charming nor reassuring.   

Beistegui roof terrace, 1930

There’s a nest of spatial reversals at play, where outsides are in and insides out.  I’ve always been fascinated by places that play with those relationships—orangeries, like the one at Dumbarton Oaks, where living nature entwines the architecture; botanical gardens, where entire ecosystems are stuffed into glass; the surreal living Le Corbusier did in 1930 at the Beistegui Apartment in Paris.  The Beach is an outside that’s inside a box inside a cavernous architectural space that feels like outside. 

The Beach is intentionally, relentlessly artificial, but our emotions and reactions are real, as if we are in an immersive replay of the film Ex Machina.  Am I over-thinking this? Well, that is in my nature, but these thoughts are immanent in the work, available to anyone who takes time to see past the surface spectacle and disarming kid-friendly playground quality.  So, come on in, the water’s great…

Ode to a Cafe Chair

Carl Sagan once said that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  I wasn't familiar with that quote, but one of my students paraphrased it recently in a discussion of world-making and the quest for purity and authenticity.  She misattributed it to the late great Douglas Adams--who knew a thing or two about hitchhiking through made-from-scratch universes--and thought it was about bread not apple pies, which I like better.  Bread, we need that.  Apple pies, not so much. 

If you really want to begin with scratch you have to follow the line, the chain of refining, processing, and cultivating to its logical beginning, eschewing the packaged and the pre-mixed, pretty soon you’re thinking about growing wheat, then contemplating harvesting wild grasses to cross-breed, and before long you’re trying to make water from an oxygen atom and a couple of hydrogens. Even the simplest things in our world are apex achievements.

If you wish to design a nice little sidewalk café, you must first shape a city. With your effortless plop into a movable chair at a too-tiny table on the sidewalk, you sit atop a Jenga tower of cultural biases, public policies, zoning adjustments, permitting, mobility technologies, traffic engineering, power struggles over public space, NIMBY-ism, urban forestry, architectural decisions, and, ultimately, the industrial design, manufacture and distribution of that lightweight chair which you can scooch with one hand, while your café Americano is in the other, from the location in which you found it to the vastly preferable half inch to the north northwest, just so you can demonstrate your agency in this fringe of public space lapping at the shores of the private interior whence your coffee came.  All this so you can sit alone and among countless others, spectators and participants, in the great exercise of urban leisure.  

If this were real...

If this were real...That’s how I begin criticism when I’m at my students’ desks coaching them as they work to become architects. If this were real...It’s an invitation, a hand extended, to enter a possible world without ever leaving this one.  It cradles the comments to follow, and offers information that the student should know—indeed will need to know in the real world--but may not have to deploy at this point, because it’s not real…yet.

Emma’s project had a courtyard sunken about 6’ below sidewalk level. An awkward dimension if you imagine yourself either above or below, but it served many purposes in her project:  gave access to a Metro station, conveyed an archaeological narrative, and gave light and air to the lower levels of her museum.  She imagined that it would be a protected and quiet space in the city. I looked at her model and in an instant a series of scenarios passed in front of my eyes, just as if I were looking at a real place.  If this were real, I said to her, I would be concerned about the eddy of space at the Metro entrance; it feels unsafe, unsurveilled, in perpetual shadow, and hidden. I’m trying to get her to see what I see, to flash forward to an unintended future architectural failure:  abandoned space, closed cafe, vandalized concrete walls, vortices of trash and dry leaves in the dark, mildewed corners, flying in contradiction to everything that Emma fervidly wishes for her world.

She hasn't learned yet how to see the spectrum of possible worlds play out from a single arrangement of fictional walls, floors, and air, to bounce these possibilities, to reflect and referee them, off a mental archive of good and bad precedents, a taxonomy of  realistic assessments of human nature, municipal budgets, and the meager staffing capacities of non-profits. I see all that in the cardboard corner of a sunken cardboard space in a cardboard city. If this were real, Emma, you would be making a place doomed to a future completely counter to what you imagine.

Writers of fiction often talk about their characters as if they’re alive and not completely under the author’s control.  They say and do things the writer didn't completely intend; they steer the story off the well-planned course and wreck deadlines.  These characters remain safely within the book though, only as real as words. When an architect’s characters—the places, elements, and material—become real, develop agendas, and take a bad turn, they do these things in our world.

Design is as fiction, until it’s not.  That is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, whether you’re a student, an architect, or a future inhabitant of a place.  A lot can happen on the way to reality. Fiction allows the author to create worlds that could or could not, should or should not, exist.  But it’s rarely her intention to execute any of these speculations; a novel is not a set of instructions for making a world.

it could have been otherwise...

If this were real…That’s a subjunctive phrase.  The tip-off is, of course, the “were.” You’ll certainly hear people—not me, mind you--say “if this was real” because we English-speakers have become grammatically casual.  We don’t attend to how we choose our words, particularly in speech.  I stick to the subjunctive structure because I've been writing (but not yet publishing) about it as a mode of architectural drawing.  I've become quite partial to it; as an architect I appreciate the snug fit of the right construction to convey the sense of the sentiment. I’m a subjunkie.

If this were real…if I were you…If this were due tomorrow…These expressions liberate architectural criticism from the dull blade of the imperative.  Simply ordering my students to do or not do certain things-- don’t ever put a door there; never make entrances like that--is no way to cultivate learning or imagination.  And don’t even start with the future indicative…That won’t work.  

Transit Reverie

A disabled train at Takoma Park.  A thickening crowd of people fill the platform at Gallery Place where I had just stepped off the Yellow Line for my usual change to Red.  They were a chatty group, attention split between glowing screens and sharing information with their fellow strandees—“My friend’s at Union Station and he’s been waiting for 15 minutes and hasn’t seen a train yet.” A muffled, muddled voice comes over the PA and we all stop, heads tilted as if tipping one ear upward will better clarify the sound.  “What did he say?”  “I have no idea.”  It’s time to consider my options.

I have many options...

I realize that I know more about the bus routes of London than I do my own city of Washington, but fortunately the little device in my pocket is my guide, my Beatrice, from the underworld.  The 42, it turns out, begins its route to Mount Pleasant right above my head at 9^th and G, so with a nod to those around me—“I’m outta here”—I make my way to the surface.

A young guy is smoking a joint in the bus shelter while his friend talks incessantly at him about Ferguson; a third sits slumped on the anti-sitting bench.  They have laid claim to the shelter, so the rest of us workers, homeless, and tourists, bump umbrellas in the cold rain.  The German couple grows impatient and hails a taxi, rolling away in Prius quiet.  I could do that too, I think to myself. Or I could Uber.  Or find a Car2Go.  Bike share is out, but I have so many options, far more than many of those around me.  But I stay and wait. Uber will be pricey, reflecting the micro-dynamics of bad weather, Metro delays, and rush hour; the taxi may or may not take a credit card and I’m cash light; and I’d rather walk home than actually get in a Smart car and drive myself.  So I wait.

such as the 42

The 42 comes right on time, reasonably close to the 2 minutes that NextBus promises.  The homeless woman with the cart is holding up the line, and declining the gentle help of the young blonde.  Sitting by the window in the warm dry bus I watch the wet city roll past me—Zara, Blackfinn, Pret a Manger.  The 42 cuts through the parts of the city that I know best which makes this trip that particularly wonderful combination of familiarity and discovery.  An H&M in the old Filene’s spot? Who knew?  Lucky Bar, still sticky no doubt.  For a moment I feel like I could be in London, watching the yellow glow of restaurants and bars, the neon lights of fast food, the cool LED glow of office lobbies.

I slip into the kind of reverie unique to transit: freed from the task of attending to where I’m going and all the obstacles and perils both major and minor that punctuate my path, I can listen to the buzz of other conversations and watch the spectacle of the city unspool, glistening in the Blade Runner rain.

Although this trip had taken about 15 minutes longer than my usual Red Line + walk, it offers a textured way to experience the city as a living continuum rather than a series of discrete and predictable points.   I should get out at Gallery Place and take the bus more often.

Metaphiers and Metaphrands

A city is a large house and a house, a small city, says the ever quotable Leon Battista Alberti, whom I have quoted before here. Like all the pithy architecture quotes about form and function and less and more and the ontological aspirations of bricks, this one lands with an authoritative yet unenlightening thud because we never get to the follow up: in what ways are city and house alike? are they alike in any meaningful way?  And, where does such a comparison get us?

 

I’ve always preferred to think of it as a sociological/administrative metaphor rather than a spatial one. In that way, it opens a way of thinking about the complexities of running a city--the shared yet distinct interests of different populations; the judicious stewardship of resources; the need for a clear decision-making hierarchy.  Although there certainly is mapping of functions and there are metaphorical urban living rooms, it’s not really the form or structure of house and city that are similar, so much as the city as a collective body and the house as household.  

For a metaphor to serve its intended didactic purpose the listener has to have sufficient familiarity with one of the terms to cast the bright light of understanding on the other term and generate the big epiphany we all crave. The city, you see, is quite like a house; and of course, you know about the house.  Take what you know about the house and contemplate the city.  Now, see how that understanding of the city bounces new light on your prior understanding of the house?  What makes a metaphor powerful, though, is when the comparison strains familiarity, when the metaphier and the metaphrand produce a new way of understanding.   

Put a group of architecture students in a room and run that metaphor by them and it oddly may not work so well.  What they know best--and what we all knew at that age--isn't house and city really, it's the campus, that magical mystery mesocosm between house and city, and between the intimate protections of childhood and the big city. The very knowledge of house, of household, that they need to pry open the metaphor is pretty thin: they are a few years removed from the houses of their youths, which were administered and stewarded by others. They—and this is a generalization of course—manage only their own resources; their control over their social space is transient and contingent.  They borrow, share, rent, move. Liberated by technology from the tether of the land-line, their personal area codes indicate only where they lived when they reached communications maturity, not where they are.  

temporary political place-making in Oaxaca, MX,  photo by Douglas Palladino

The monolithic words “city” and “house” aren’t sufficiently exercised to be sufficient anymore. It can’t compete with Alberti in succinctness, but for the Millennials an  urban campus is a great shared apartment; a shared apartment, a miniature urban campus, where "campus" rings closer to its original meaning of a field, a temporary making of place surrounded by something else.  And,  maybe the terms "house" and "city" have become stale to us all.  There is a line of thinking in urban theory that says the contemporary city is unknowable; that the beloved formal clarity and legibility of the traditional city persists only in precincts for nostalgic consumption.  Perhaps the house is equally unknowable, in which case the metaphor holds, just not in the way it is usually deployed.

The Hunch

It starts with the solitary intimations of a problem, of bits and pieces here and there which seem to offer clues to something hidden.  They look like fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole.  This tentative vision must turn into a personal obsession; for a problem that does not worry us is no problem: there is no drive in it, it does not exist.    

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension

A problem that does not worry us is no problem.  No problem!  Isn’t that the point?  To have no problems?  Hey man, no problem.  No worries.  I don’t have a problem with that.  You got a problem with it? 

Like “criticism,” the word “problem” has a very different meaning in creative or scientific inquiry than it does in casual conversation.  It’s the nature of scientific problems that epistemologist Polanyi is talking about in the quote above, but it applies equally well to design, particularly in design research, that mysterious territory of abduction, selective historiography, and innovation.

I shared this quote with my Comparative Urbanism class to shore up my own theories of problem-setting and solving because the syllabus emphasizes “independent research” on a topic of the student’s own choosing.  The word “research” looms opaque and intimidating over design students.  Am I supposed to be a scholar?  Am I supposed to be proving something?  Disproving something?  How is it all supposed to help me design, when I close the LOC or Avery website and start sketching? How do I choose a topic? A thesis question?  (If you really want to torment a graduate student, be sure to ask, every chance you get, no matter the subject of the conversation, “but what’s your thesis question?”)

It begins with The Hunch, my shorthand for what Polanyi more eloquently explains in his little but dense book The Tacit Dimension.  The Hunch comes from perception, experience, and exposure.  It is personal, but if we are dedicated to contributing to our chosen fields, it can’t stay that way.  So, as we reflect on where The Hunch came from, we have to figure out a way to interrogate it.  Historical research? Primary sources? First hand observation? Interviews? Design research is catholic, small c intended; it opens its eclectic arms to embrace bits of the scientific method, investigative journalism, historiography, and detective work, not to mention leaps of creativity. It’s easy to be transgressive in design research, to spill over accepted boundaries and make inappropriate noises.  Oddly, that’s its strength because its goals, its ends, are quite different from these other forms of research.  What’s important, though, is for the designer to determine exactly what standard of scholarship is necessary for action.  And then be completely faithful.

I have a hunch. I’ve had it for a while but haven’t yet done the research necessary to own it.  It is personal, constructed on my time spent in Williamsburg and Washington, but its significance isn’t limited to me.  It is a good problem, and it obsesses me with a constant background buzz, begging for attention.  It’s this:  That the late 17^th century plans for the two royal capitals of the Virginia and Maryland colonies, Williamsburg and Annapolis-- both designed in the 1690s by Sir Francis Nicholson—influenced L’Enfant’s plan for Washington a hundred years later. There’s a lot of correlative evidence for this with various asides and casual mentions by John Reps, Larry Vale, and others of similarities among these cities, but I’ve yet to see anything that documents an actual influence.  And, I have my own slightly conspiratorial theories about that.  What would I need, aside from simply elevating this hunch to the top of my research to do list, to write the definitive urban proof?  Some correspondence between the father of our country and his architect, maybe something like this…

Dear Peter,

I’m glad to hear you’ll be tackling the Capital City project!  Your letter was quite persuasive.  You’re so right that no nation has ever had such an opportunity…no pressure, though.  BTW, Tom will come around, I’m sure, but you know how he is. He’s a smart guy—won’t let anyone forget that he went to William and Mary—but on this project he’s just not thinking big enough. 

The whole French connection will be a big selling point, even though things are looking a little rocky over there right now. Still I see your point that just a nice plan of rond-points and diagonal avenues overlaid on a Cartesian grid isn’t enough to make decisions about where to locate important buildings.  So by all means, make use of that Nicholson fellow’s work in Maryland and Virginia, but let’s keep that to ourselves.  Mentioning an English precedent?  Too soon, Peter. Too soon.

Cheers,

GW