Thursday, September 20, 2007

a wrinkle in time

Margaret Crawford’s piece brings up many interesting issues for me regarding designing public space. The most provocative issue, I think, is how there are few, if any, good examples of a truly democratic public space, as the ones normally cited, like the acropolis, worked solely because of their exclusionary nature. This, of course, brings up the issue of designing for separate publics, an idea, I think, that many architects are adverse to, but in attempting to design for everyone they often end up designing for no one. I would call for a greater recognition of the exclusionary realities of public design, and for architects to embrace designing for the specific publics that are actually in a position to use the intervention that they are creating.

All of these issues about “democratic” public space and the many different publics one has to consider in a modern urban environment, calls to mind the national mall in Washington DC, perhaps because that is the city which I lived in most recently. The national mall, as do many other parks throughout the US, functions as a space that is co-opted in an almost weekly basis by different groups advocating different causes/events. While the different publics don’t exist in the same space at the same time, I am intensely interested in this layering of public spaces that takes place in this venue, as well as in civic centers and stadiums/music venues. I see such potential for this series of adjacencies through time!

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