Place matters. Where
we teach and where we learn, I have
argued to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldn’t, is entangled in what and how we teach and learn. I have no real quantitative data to support
the assertion, though, and I’m not sure how one would devise a method to
determine the veracity of my claim.
“I could tell you,”
says Italo Calvino, in his description of the city of Zaira in Invisible Cities, “how many steps make
up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves,
and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs: but I already know that this
would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this,
but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of
its past…”
Some things
simply elude quantitative measure; there are distances that step counters can’t
count nor mile markers mark. How long does it take to climb the spiral stair in
the WAAC library? 22 years and 10 seconds. Distance and measure are more
elastic than our instruments can register. Time drags and flies—we accept that.
But space is a partner in time, and so it too shrinks and stretches. Not all
½-mile walks are created equal. A walk on a narrow sidewalk, barren of trees,
pressed against a blank wall or parking lot, stretches into tedium; while a
walk down a broad, tree lined, generously windowed and doored sidewalk is
almost too short to enjoy properly. Our responsibility as designers is, in a
way, to give meaning to measure, to provide touchstones—stones to touch.
Workdays—mine at least—were measured in these qualitative
and highly situational distances. Would I stroll around the corner to my
colleagues’ offices to share this? How long a walk is that? Would I walk down
the hall to listen to this? How long a walk is that? Across campus? Is this the
kind of thing we would discuss over coffee, thus requiring a walk across the street?
And, what is the difference between an hour-long meeting and an hour-long
meeting over coffee? Meeting for coffee is something more and other than simply
meeting; not every meeting is worth the walk, short as it is.
Now we schedule virtual coffees, lunches, and happy hours--we
humans are nothing if not adaptable. These meetings occur, but they don’t take
place. One tangible consequence of this is that I am having a hard time
remembering the difference between one meeting and another, because everything happens
here, in the same place. The city outside functions like a memory
palace, letting us tag--to use the social media term--places with events. Each
of us has a unique lived world, constructed of the places we have lived, the paths
we walk, the trains or buses we take, the coffee shop we visit, the lunch place
with daily special. It keeps our memories in place.
Calvino, again: “The city, however, does not tell is past,
but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the street,
the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the
lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with
scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
Place matters because place measures. And remembers.
