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.

Prepositions, before and after

I’ve been thinking about prepositions. You know, those little words that shouldn’t terminate sentences but do. They come in pairs—in/out, above/below, on/under, before/after—and they seem fond of clarity. You’re either with us or against us. There was before and now there’s after; there’s nothing in between. 

Stay in. Don’t go out. Work on the computer. These little words tell us so much about ourselves and where we are, physically and metaphorically. It’s in their very name—to pre-position, to place before. Prepositions fix our place in time and space, and therefore our relations to others. For such small words, and ones we use so reflexively, they carry a heavy burden of conveying conditions of belonging or alienation, otherness or inclusion, at-homeness or displacement.

I live in the city. I work in a different city, but whether I am at home or at work, I am in the city. To move from one city to the other, I would go out, into the public realm of sidewalks and transit. That was before. Now, like everyone, I’m inside, #staying at home, in this city. I have never felt more aware of in. I am in my home, but at work, online. On line. On-line. Online. In the New Jersey vernacular of my youth, “on line” meant the condition of waiting in a linear arrangement with other people, a condition others might call being in line, or in a queue. Now it means something else, with no connection anymore to being somewhere, on a line connecting two points. Now we are networked. You can be on a line, but you are in a network.

Quality of life in the city, which is dense by definition, depends on clear thresholds between the pockets of public and private places that define urbanity. They are so clear they have names: gate, stoop, porch, vestibule, lobby, bay window…But that suite of relationships collapses online. The thresholds have vanished. We sit in our private spaces, looking through a glowing rectangle at the private spaces of others, at rooms we would never be invited into, hearing sounds from off-stage—barking dogs, clanking dishes—we shouldn’t hear. Private and public spaces—our private and public selves—are inside out while still inside, like a Klein bottle. 

I shouldn’t be in my students’ rooms and they shouldn’t be in mine. That’s why we have schools, libraries, museums, cafes, theaters, clubs, markets, plazas, playing fields, street corners: so I can meet you in a place that belongs to neither of us; so we can make room for strangers; so we can meet in a place big enough to hold a lot of us; so we can determine

what comes in and what stays out. The magic of the city is its capacity to offer all those places, and everything in between. Lewis Mumford described the city as both a magnet and a container: it attracts us with promises, so many promises, and then holds us--because it just keeps promising and we can’t quit it.

One of my thesis students said yesterday that this virus is the “enemy of urban design.” She wants to design a community place, for the human network, one like Italo Calvino’s city of Ersilia, entangled in strings of different colors to signify “a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency.” Calvino says that these strings represent the “relationships that sustain the city’s life,” and the citizens of Ersilia are constantly abandoning and rebuilding them. One of the intriguing aspects of this strange new world is that we are finding new ways to connect those strings, because we deeply need them. So when it’s time to leave the in, and venture out into the city again, we can put those strings back in place, more substantial and with better knots.

Don't it always seem to go...?

Don't it always seem to go that we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone. Right as usual, Joni. The "it" that's gone in this case is the public realm, with the public in it. A paradise in its own way, even if it is in fact often paved. Love of cities in the time of Covid-19 is problematic. It even feels inappropriate (self-serving, off-key, tone deaf...insert your own adjective) to ruminate on civic health as distinct from public health.

Before--yes, we can now speak of a before and an after--I had a little notebook filled with half-baked ideas for blog posts. They were stranded in the notebook, half-baked, because I had failed to maintain the dam that held back just enough of my administrative tasks to keep my productive writing wetlands from being drowned. Failure to maintain may be a theme here. One post, on what the rules of improv have to do with good urban space, is a bit more than half-baked; it's actually browning nicely, if still soft in the middle. Yet it seems too chipper and shallow to post right now.

What is it that's gone that we didn't know we got 'til now? Sharing the spectacle of sport. Gathering to protest an injustice. Marching. Occupying. Assembling to redress a grievance. Worshiping someone or something. Live music--playing it and listening. Seeing coffee shop regulars, and the other familiar strangers who speckle our lived space. Being alone in a crowd. Watching people. Eavesdropping. The world of together, of transit, of third places, and parks, of plazas and piazzas. We're missing the city floor.

Residential buildings in US cities often don’t have the fringe of balconies that characterize housing in Italy or Spain, and we tend to draw a sharper line between public and private. We have seen the isolated in those countries engage with one another in applause and song, several floors above the street, but still in the manner of the street. It's as if the social space of the piazza, flat as a sheet of paper, crinkled up until it invaded the previously private air between homes. In dense cities people have to practice the fine art of a disattenuation, which is being in a position to see what someone is doing nearby but pretending, politely, not to--think of elevator cab or subway platform behavior. But now, with the possibility to assemble, to be part of a civic body, denied at ground level, the desire has no where to go but up. In time, that air will float slowly back to the ground, as one by one we congeal back into a public. Will we remember what we got when it was gone?

Cities from Scratch

Paolo Soleri would have been 100 years old today. He was born, appropriately, on the solstice in 1919 in Turin, Italy. He died at 93, probably still speaking in the future tense as he had his entire professional life, never giving up on the brave new world he was going to make. 

He was 87, lean and weathered, when I met him at Arcosanti to look through the archives for drawings and models for an exhibition that didn’t happen—hasn’t yet happened. I had interviewed him earlier, when he came to Washington to receive the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for lifetime achievement. As I remember it, Laura Bush would be giving him the award but Paolo was so angry and disgusted by the Bush administration that when she handed it to him he was going to hand her a several-pages long diatribe on the wreckage her husband had made of the country. How does one respond to a desert prophet with such a plan? One can picture Laura Bush’s frozen smile, as she looked into his piercing ungrateful eyes. If only he were still with us…

It takes a certain ferocity to decide to build a new world in the desert outside of Phoenix, and Soleri was uncompromising. Soleri’s cities, his “arcologies” are radical reorganizations of space and society, because you can’t really have one without the other. When architects and urban designers talk about “form” and “order” they are referring to physical elements and spatial arrangements. The very same terms, though, have currency in political discourse, in what James Scott calls “statecraft,” and it is in the deployment of such terms that the city, as both a physical place and a political entity, comes into being.

I’ve been thinking a lot about making cities from scratch as I read Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, chase the ghost of Francis Nicholson--serial royal governor and purported city-shaper of Williamsburg and Annapolis—and reflect on Soleri’s efforts. It’s easy to dismiss Arcosanti as so much windmill tilting, itself a metaphor with a renewable energy twist, and to dismiss the idea that novel architectural forms like cast concrete apses would be sufficient to effect the revolution. It’s also easy to forget how long city-making takes and how rare are the true cities from scratch. Yet, the irascible Nicholson sketched the outlines of new royal capital cities as part of his job to keep the colonists in line. The bones of those two cities were sufficiently compelling that they ended up embedded in the plan for Washington, a city most definitely not designed for obedient colonists.