Learn about the key design intentions behind London's public spaces, the role of designers in protecting their 'publicness,' and the impact of commercialization. Uncover the historical context of state-financed projects and the shift towards landscape and public realm architects. This is for anyone interested in architecture, urban planning, and the dynamic interplay between design and society in London.
Learn about the key design intentions behind London's public spaces, the role of designers in protecting their 'publicness,' and the impact of commercialization. Uncover the historical context of state-financed projects and the shift towards landscape and public realm architects. This is for anyone interested in architecture, urban planning, and the dynamic interplay between design and society in London.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Learn about the key design intentions behind London's public spaces, the role of designers in protecting their 'publicness,' and the impact of commercialization. Uncover the historical context of state-financed projects and the shift towards landscape and public realm architects. This is for anyone interested in architecture, urban planning, and the dynamic interplay between design and society in London.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848224179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2020 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Importance of Design
The measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.
John Ruskin
The term 'public space' isn't very old. Post-war, one talked of the need in cities for 'open space', predominantly green, and 'civic space', predominantly hard-paved. 'Public space' as a term seems to have emerged more fully in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, with a new emphasis on its ability to attract investment, as well as its civic virtues. Civic public spaces are unavoidably declarative. The government of the day, at whatever level, is involved in creating or preserving room for them, and has a stake in what these spaces 'say', even if they are produced by the private sector (developers and their investors).
Public spaces also carry an emotional investment. The local public realm, whether streets or squares or parks, is an extension of our dwellings, where we can meet neighbours on more neutral ground and contain outsiders. Civic public spaces, on the other hand, are cosmopolitan in terms of scale and visitor, and although they can also serve as extensions of our domestic lives and carry our individual memories, they fulfil other functions too – public culture, commemoration, celebration and protest. These enactments can be 'for' certain groups more than others, but there is in the term 'civic' an implication (in democracies), that any citizen, from the city in question or elsewhere, can in some way participate.
Within the confines of this book, the public realm is taken to be physical, comprising public space and public circulation. Public space here is taken to be hard-paved and civic, because it was, and still is, the province of the architect (fig.1.1). There is of course also digital public space, and informal as well as formal public space. These variants are also found under the term 'public realm' but are not discussed here. Even if, however, one is confining a discussion of public space to a particular kind, there are further subdivisions. Matthew Carmona created a useful taxonomy of subcategories such as 'neglected space', 'twenty-four-hour space', 'exclusionary space' and 'parochial space' (one type of user rather than all types). These are internal as well as external, and one of the most noticeable changes in the past decade has been the evolution of 'third space', internal semi-public spaces, as in the circulation areas of the British Library and the National Theatre, where people who do not use the library (fig.1.2) or the theatre set themselves up for the day to work, use the Wi-Fi, and meet others free of charge.
Public space can be formal, that is intentional and designed, or informal, an appropriation of some element of the public realm meant for one purpose and taken over by a public for another. This unplanned-for activity can be trivial, like a rave, or more subversive – a political demonstration or occupation of property, in which the design professions play no part, except perhaps as participants. Within formal spaces, therefore, the highest level of inclusion possible should be aimed for, because the social and physical health of a city is measured, among other things, by the condition and use of its public spaces. They are a barometer of the city's success or failure in promoting a social environment open and stable enough to tolerate, if not embrace, difference.
Achieving this has much to do with the management of a public space, but also with its design. There is a host of 'design guides' produced by both central and local governments which present the design of public space as a spatial problem to be solved spatially, addressing questions of physical access, connectivity, scale, ornament, materials, etc. Certainly, such a meat-and-potatoes approach simplifies things, as with this definition of the urban square:
Square:
A formal public space no larger than a block and located at focal points of civic importance fronted by key buildings, usually hard paved and providing passive recreation.
This may be sufficient to produce the artefacts themselves, and perhaps the design of public space is simply irrelevant to our current anxieties about the privatisation and commodification of public space, addressing instead the need for a pleasant microclimate and attractive physical features:
[B]eyond offering protection from sun, wind and rain, ... the design of the public space needs to be anthropometrically and ergonomically sensitive ... [P]hysical characteristics that can contribute to comfort in public spaces include sitting space ... generous sidewalk width, trees, shade and shelter, a high degree of articulation with nooks, corners, small setbacks in adjacent walls, and landscape elements such as ledges and planters, among others.
Beyond such considerations, however, there is a wealth of symbolic meaning to be found in this material expression of a public space, and the way its constituent parts make it clear whether a design is seeking to include or exclude, be cosmopolitan or bespoke. Part of this has to do with the visual cues provided to users about gradations of public and private, and the subtleties of the semi-public and the semi-private, known as 'porosity'.
Two spaces on Park Avenue in New York City demonstrate how important the language of design is, and how much it communicates in terms of an attitude to the public. The first is a plaza outside, or rather under, Lever House by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (1952) (figs 1.3 and 1.4), a curtain wall slab block sitting on a two-storey podium occupying the entire site. On the Park Avenue side, the podium sits on columns above a large open plaza that leads to the lobby entrances. Since the completion of the Lever House renovation, the building's outdoor plaza and glassen-closed lobby have been used as an exhibition area for the Lever House art collection. Unless there is now extra security, the public can still penetrate beneath the raised podium and on into the plaza, but they may be hesitant to do so. The architectural vocabulary – the line of columns facing onto Park Avenue, the offices above one's head – says, at best, 'semi-public', if not 'private', and there may well be no other people there to encourage one to follow suit.
On the other hand, the space outside Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building (1958), another International Style curtain wall slab, diagonally opposite Lever House, quite clearly states that it is open to the general public (figs 1.5 and 1.6). There is no volume sitting above the plaza itself; it is readily open to the user, even if Mies didn't anticipate people making themselves quite so at home there. A wide variety of people – construction and office workers, tourists, children – sit on the steps, cool their feet in the shallow reflecting pools and eat lunch on the low walls. The plaza's design, together with its management, is of a light touch. The minimal gestures made by Mies to articulate the plaza allow people to find their own ways of being there, the essence of cosmopolitanism.
The Seagram Plaza was one of many public spaces in New York studied by the American sociologist, William H. Whyte, for the City Planning Commission. His research culminated in 1980 with the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, a book and a film describing the ways in which people and public space design meet. His observations and conclusions, based on sixteen years of watching people in public, are as perceptive as they are down-to-earth:
The human backside is a dimension architects seem to have forgotten.
What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.
It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.
Design is thus clearly not an optional extra if one wants a thriving public realm, so it is not a little discouraging to be confronted by statements like this from a 2005 UK government-commissioned report by the think tank, Demos:
In sum, the success of public space is predicated on the way in which it encourages use: diverse use and diverse activities encourage diverse people. Hence public space should form the everyday setting of activities that people can undertake in different degrees of 'togetherness', rather than a set piece design.
As if 'set piece design' can't be part of that 'setting' and hasn't been for centuries. Nevertheless, a kind of inverted snobbery persists about the relevance of design and its ability to address diversity:
The 'urban renaissance' agenda appears too concerned with matters of urban design, as well as being distinctly metropolitan in character. The majority of public spaces that people use are local spaces they visit regularly, often quite banal in design, or untidy in their activities or functions (such as street markets and car boot sales), but which nevertheless retain important social functions.
If only we were too concerned with design, our cities may have been able to avoid the worst of the demoralising visual blight they've suffered since the war and continue to suffer. To say we shouldn't concern ourselves with the design of the public realm is to reduce civic life to domestic transactions in local markets. Apart from anything else, design can greatly increase inclusivity:
The principle of inclusive design is at the heart of the proposals for King's Cross Central. This means the whole development would be planned and designed to include everyone, providing physical accessibility to people of all ages including those with disabilities and providing information to people of all levels of learning disabilities. To achieve this, the differing needs of a wide range of people would be taken into account so as to ensure that circulation routes, lifts, ramps, paving surfaces, lighting, colours and information systems would all be accessible and convenient for everyone.
There are, in fact, three stances one can adopt when thinking about formal public spaces. At one end, the dominant end, public spaces are considered in terms of their users: 'If public spaces are to have a greater degree of traction as social, shared spaces, then the essential first step is to start with people rather than the physical space.' At the other, barely visited end, they are considered in terms of their producers – clients, planners, politicians, designers. In the middle, in the Dutch modernist architect Herman Hertzberger's words, 'is the interaction of form and users, what they convey to each other and bring about in each other, and how they mutually take possession of each other'.
Given that decades of social science literature has fruitfully devoted itself to the user – the user's 'right to the city', the user's access to public space, the privatisation/securitisation of public space, the 'end of public space' – and very few commentators have paid any attention to the design of public space, one can't easily get to Hertzberger's middle ground – the 'interaction of form and users' – without better understanding how that form is produced. Or rather, how those forms are produced, as design is about the particularity of public spaces, and not the abstraction of public space, which tempts too many into generalisations about its 'death'. The academic and campaigner Matthew Carmona has set the bar high with his rigorously empirical work on design governance and public spaces in cities, including London, and the unexpectedly healthy state (i.e. used by everyone) of much of its physical public realm. While this book puts more emphasis on design than governance, it is an ally in Carmona's evidence-based work.
Long before the contemporary focus on the user, Hertzberger outlined the task of the designer in the production of public space:
What we have to aim for is to form the material in such a way that – as well as answering to the function in the narrower sense – it will be suitable for more purposes. And thus, it will be able to play as many roles as possible in the service of the various, individual users – so that everyone will then be able to react to it for himself, interpreting it in his own way, annexing it to his familiar environment, to which it will then make a contribution.
Many variables affect the realisation of this intention: politics, economics, clients' agendas, planning law, management and users themselves. In examining design and the designer, one must necessarily examine these factors and players as well. They are all central to the production of the public realm. Nevertheless, there is a world of considerations particular to the act of designing, and it's with these that the book begins.
Designing embraces two operations. The first is the design of the brief, the verbal description of the intended material artefact, its function and the way it is to be made. This brief is assembled through complex negotiations between clients, designers, planners, communities, local authorities, and sometimes higher levels of government. The second operation is the translation of the brief into material form, or at least into representations of material form (drawings). These translations are performed by laboriously trained designers – architects, urban designers, landscape architects, public realm architects – but translated into what? And how? At its most basic, public space needs to be readable as public. People need to see evidence that they are welcome there. The first and simplest visual cue, as William H. Whyte pointed out, is the sight of other members of the public passing through or occupying a space (fig.1.7).
Other visual cues are provided by the design itself and can sometimes be accidentally – or deliberately – ambiguous. If a public space is raised too high, so its visibility is compromised, the user may feel uncertain about whether to proceed. This is certainly the case with the Economist Plaza in Mayfair, London (1964), designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (fig.1.8). There was a practical reason to raise the Economist Plaza half a level – to accommodate parking underneath – but there was also an architectural reason: to create a calmer space, or 'charged void' (Smithsons). The result is ambiguous: is it public or semipublic or even private?
Space is in fact a series of gradations between full access and no access, with public space supposedly fully accessible, but in fact veering off into degrees of accessibility determined as much by design – for example, steps barring the disabled – as management – closing hours, the exclusion of anti-social, or even social, behaviours (fig.1.9). Similarly, if a public space is half-hidden behind walls and/or narrow entrances, the user may be uncertain how to read it. Am I allowed in there or not? Is it for everyone or just the people occupying the surrounding buildings? Such uncertainty can result in the inadvertent 'privatisation' of a public space, in that people censor their own access.
On the other hand, the formal expression of this 'compression' (narrow entrance) and 'release' (open space) can be an exciting experience for the user, once they understand it's for them. A combination of cues is needed for this to work: a stimulating architectural experience engaged in because users can see other members of the public beyond the ambiguous entrance. The technique was used to great effect – both inside and out – by Colin St John Wilson and Partners when designing the British Library (fig.1.10).
If legibility is the primary concern of the user, for the designer there is the tension between continuity and innovation to consider in achieving that legibility. We tend to think of hard-paved public spaces in terms of squares, or at least open spaces formed by the buildings around them. This is the traditional urban pattern of solid and void, the 'DNA' of public spaces, with the voids cut out of a continuous urban fabric, passed down over centuries in European cities, and reproduced in Europe's colonies. In contrast, the dominant model of spatial organisation for modernists was universal space, a break with recognisable typologies and spatial hierarchies; an abstract and infinitely extendable grid on which sat buildings-as-objects; a flow of space that eschewed the usual indications of how one moved around it and entered buildings from it (figs 1.11–1.13).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Designing London's Public Spaces"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Susannah Hagan.
Excerpted by permission of Lund Humphries.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.