seminar 5 with seminar 3's readings; what's in a number?

The most important questions that these readings raise for me pertains to the scale at which architectural interventions take place. How can the scale of a project be measured when, for example, the Trump complex in mid-town Manhattan acted not only on its direct site but also on the sewage treatment and public transportation station that served it? Where does the reach of a project end? How do many projects, operating at many different scales of influence, interact to construct the poche background that planners and architects have traditionally regarded, as Czerniak describes, as a character-less medium for architectural insertions?

I appreciate Czerniak’s call to architects and planners to see architecture as a device, rather than as an object, which can transform the urban landscape and fabric, yet not be in complete control of the varied elements which constitute it, or of the relationship between the user and the space. This view, of the city as a space of differences which operate on multiple scales to create a dynamic fabric of varied interactions, seems to me to be the perfect container for the many publics that we have been discussing thus far. As Kahn discusses, the specificity of an urban site, like Times Square, is made possible because of coexisting, but not coincident, urban operations. This is, indeed, how I understand that the city as a whole is able to exist; through the co-presentness of different, and not necessarily interacting, publics. Attempting to design for all of the publics in a city is a bit like attempting to situate a project at all of the different scales of a site; a noble, and exciting, challenge that will likely continue to occupy the imaginations of landscape urbanists.