Place Matters

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.