Plato, architectural renderings, public spaces and biology

I spent some time in Waterloo's new public square yesterday.  It's about a 1 mile walk from my office, so an easy jaunt for me to get into the city for lunch, and much of that walk takes me along a nice trail through some woods and past a nice urban park filled with kids and moms on picnics and university students sitting by the riverbank thinking deep thoughts.  We've all been talking about this new space for years now.  It was initially mired in controversy because it replaces a few parking spots, and there were lots of people who thought that parking right in the middle of the busiest part of the the busiest pedestrian street in Waterloo was a good use of space.  I'd driven past the space a few times and listened to its design being brutally panned by my 13 year old daughter.  I'd tried to explain to her the reasoning behind some of the features of the design, as I understood them, but my words were a little hollow as, truth be told, it's not a tremendously attractive space for the drive-by observer.  Her complaint that this was a big hunk of flat concrete when it could have been so much more had some truth to it, frankly.  And her criticism of the sculpture -- a slightly off-kilter bell, had the ring of truth to it (ha, yeah, funny).

But you've got to be in a place at street level to understand it (which is one of my main points today), so I wanted to go there.  I bought some lunch at a small takeout place that's located somewhere behind the square -- top left in the plan view you're looking at -- and I decided to just eat it there at some little tables they had set up rather than cart it over to the square.  The view I had from my little seat was of a fairly busy street -- Willis Way (though in fairness extra busy these days because it serves as a detour around some downtown road construction) -- and also of a gigantic parking lot which is one of the main lots in the downtown area.  Fair enough -- if you want people who don't live in your core to use your core, you've got to give them somewhere to park.  I just wish some of it could be underground or at least compacted a little more by being multi-level.

After lunch I ventured out to the square which looks much like the plan view rendering, except in one important respect.  I've talked about this here before, and I had further long email discussions of this very thing with my friend Richard, and also with an architect friend of mine recently.  I think those tiny dots in the rendering are meant to be the positions of people.  Thing is, unless there's a ballroom dancing lesson, or a concert, or some kind of organized event, people don't often mill about in the middle of large, flat, concrete spaces.  They're much more likely to use the edges.  This is not only good sense (the interesting features and services are more likely to be located around the edges), but downright biological (we have an affinity to locations affording prospect and refuge -- the sheltering corners and cubbies from which we can observe the grand vistas of the square).  So what matters here is that the rendering betrays a failure to take into account how the space might actually be used and understood by people.

My architect friend told me that one of the great difficulties he finds in training young architects is to encourage them to understand how the world works at the ground level rather than at plan view.  We never actually see the square as it is drawn here.  And what we see from the ground looks very different to us, and works in an entirely different way.  He likened it to a contrast between a Platonic view of the world in which objects and structures are boiled down to their ideal, abstracted forms, and an Aristotelean view in which we're grounded in the vital particularity of the experience.  And I think that observation is right on the money.  I think it also speaks to a greater problem that permeates every realm of our thinking about our built environment:  it's the distinction between how spaces will actually work given our biology and our psychology, and how we would like to think that they might work based on an idealized view of who we are and what we ought to want.

At a much more prosaic level, I have to say that the square suffers from bad edges.  When I think of the happiest day I ever spent in a public square, I remember a particular late afternoon on a visit to Bonn.  I stumbled accidentally into a large, pedestrian space that was ringed by many cafes and restaurants, all of which had a few tables that spilled out into a part of the square.  I sat at one of them and quenched my hot afternoon thirst with a delicious, fresh wheat beer.  The combination of a little shaded spot at the edge of a grand vista, the drink and food, and the sight of a busy and interesting square made me never want to leave.  And in fact I think I ended up sitting there for about six hours by myself, enjoying the sights, an evening concert, dinner, and yes, a little more beer.

Could our little mid-sized city square be like this?  I don't know.  Maybe it's a pipe-dream to think so.  But as things are right now, it definitely could not be, because it can't be properly surrounded by the right kinds of offerings.  Three sides of the square are surrounded by roads, so it's impossible for the businesses that surround the square to have tables spilling into the space -- which I think is very important.  The businesses that do surround the square are not of the right type.  The marquee building is a drug store with a large sign that dominates the space.  At the moment, there's not even any interesting street food on offer.  You've got to have public food to have public space.

But I still think it's better than a parking lot.

Comments

[Michael]

I believe the only legal street food here is hot dogs, unfortunately.

Regarding space usage -- let's hope the square gets the funds to build a fountain and/or skating rink. (The compromise was that those features were only "roughed in", saving a half million or so.)