Andrea Kahn declares the problem of site definition as a "necessarily indefinite task" (79). Is there productive value in debating the multitudinous, multifarious (this week's readings richly expound upon a vocabulary of multi-'s) scales and layers of meaning in a site? Kahn and Pollack make the same point, that thinking about the multiple scales that a site may occupy yields latent potentials in the uses of a site.
What happens when the thought process is reversed: to first discover clandestine urban practices, and then find the appropriate framework for such activities? I believe this process would transform how we think about what is a site. The Cheeseboard median mid-day meal munching mob, for example, practice the semi-public act of a picnic on grounds which are not approved of for picnic-ing by the city. Margaret Crawford suggested an intervention of a pizza-eating apparatus--the scale of the body becomes the site for investigation with this idea. And this is interesting to me, the overlap now of essentially ergonomic design with urban design. Urbanism of inches. Site is boundless, it goes inward as far as it goes outward.
Outward being Burns' domain of site understanding, which she boils down to the desire for building and site as one system made up of many interdependent exchanges. My criticism of her view, while it neatly solves the disconnect between a building and the material it depends upon, is that a site boundary can be a desirable , productive line to draw and to re-present. I'm not sure Burns would disagree, but the emphasis seems to be on dissolution of site boundary to solve a (very pressing) techno-environmental global problem.
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