Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Twitter on the sidebar

It's a tiny thing, but I thought I'd just mention that there's a Twitter sidebar on the blog now.  I've been exploring tools that I can use to track my location (twerl, schlapmapscherl, fwherl, sschweretheheck) etc. that may figure in future posts, including those that might help you claim some book swag.

Talk of using mobile applications to track our locations seems to be at fever pitch these days.  Funny, that.  Knowing where we are, and where those we care about are, is primal.  We may be living in an age where technology brings us all closer together, but that doesn't mean we don't understand the importance of knowing where our actual bodies are.

For some reason, I'm thinking of my brother.  He was an early adopter of the car phone.  Remember car phones?  They were almost the size of cinder blocks, like those giant walkie talkies you see Sparky using in old time war movies.  He'd hoist his big device up to his head (amazing he's got two ears still and that they weren't burned off by gamma rays) to tell me the most important thing of all:  "I'm calling from my car."

The landmarks of a city

I've got a big bunch of ideas rolling around in my head today.  Perhaps some part of my cerebral cortex has registered that Richard Florida has been in town over the weekend, seeding the air with interesting talk about geography and commerce.  I'll roll out the ideas one by one so as to avoid those epic blog posts that cause readers' eyes to glaze over.  Just a short note today about landmarks.

Landmarks can serve in an iconic role.  Marketing a city can revolve around landmarks of one kind or another.  In Toronto, the city where I grew up (kinda), the buzz over the last couple of years has come from dazzling architectural creations like the Libeskind renovation of the ROM (which doesn't do it for me) and the Gehry transformation of the AGO (which definitely does): two new city landmarks.  But another time-worn strategy is to go tall.  When I ask you to think of famous city landmarks, you're likely to jerk your gaze upwards.  The Seattle needle, the Washington monument, the Eiffel Tower, the CN Tower.  Not all of these landmarks are beautiful.  In fact, with the possible exception of the Washington monument (and I can't say why I like that one more than the others), none of them caress my eye.  Sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, a landmark can be a tall hole in space.  When I visit Manhattan, I still find my eyes drawn to two extra towers of gaping sky.  Landmarks can identify a space in a city and make a wide range of different statements ranging from "I am here" to "This is what we were."  That hole in space in Manhattan is, if it's anything, a kind of temporal marker separating us from a time that at least seemed simpler, even if we now understand we may have been deluded.  That hole has dropped the veil from our eyes, perhaps.

In a new video, I talk about the landmark that meant the most to me growing up.  This one, living in a landscape that I knew well as a child, is woven through some of my own autobiography.  It keeps me in place on the drive in to the city, so it acts as a navigational landmark, but it's much more than that.  I can't look at it without finding that some ancient memory has been triggered.

Lost in St. Mary's

I could have entered my own contest today.  We set off from home to take our daughter to a ringette game in St. Mary's Ontario -- a drive of roughly an hour from our house.  We had a nice page of Mapquest directions in hand, but I'd forgotten to throw my gps tracker into my pocket.  Looked simple enough.  Somehow we missed one turn in the route.  Boring so far.

Here's where it gets slightly more interesting.  As we reached within about 2 km of our destination, our directions told us we should turn left even though we had just passed about fifty signs telling us that St. Mary's was on the right.  So we turned left, drove about 19 km away from our destination, tracking our progress in the rear view mirror ("gee, now we're 13 km from St. Mary's!").  We're not usually stupid people (really!) but found ourselves entertaining a plethora of entertaining hypotheses rather than admit that we were lost.  It's amazing how quickly we abandon both reason and a basic understanding of geometry when we're lost.  Maybe there are TWO St. Mary's!  Maybe the St. Mary's arena is not actually IN St. Mary's.  It reminded me of our miraculous discovery of a pair of perfect mirror image lakes, each with matching osprey nests, on our hike in Algonquin park.  I talk about this in my book.  But at least this time, rather than being chased by bears, my kid was just chased by Bears (the Kitchener Bears).  Eventually we saw sense, turned the car around, drove at about Mach 1.1 to get to the ice on time.  And now my kiddo is wearing a gold medal around her neck.

Getting closer to book release

The official release date of my book is now palpably close.  I have to admit that I'm a bit nervous about this.  It's a different process to academic writing where you submit a paper to a journal, wait the 2 or 3 months for some kind of puff of smoke, and then bear down for the comments of the anonymous reviewers.  Nastiness isn't unusual, but at least if you are completely hammered you have the option of slipping the reviews into the bottom drawer of your desk, where nobody ever has to know about them other than you, an editor, and the reviewers.  In the case of a trade book, everything is different.  First, there's no obligation that your book be reviewed at all.  It could be ignored, completely, which would be unhappy.  Second, if you are lucky enough to get a few reviews, they could be bad ones, and if they are, anybody -- your best friend, worst enemy, Uncle Henry and cousin Betsy can all read them.  There's no hiding them in the bottom drawer.  You're out there.  

On the other hand, with academic publishing, you don't really get to do fun things like this.  I might be too nervous to eat much brunch, but it's a very cool event and I'm glad to be going.

In other book news, I'm hard at work designing a new page for my website which explains how QR codes work (I've spoken about these before and will again soon).  There are a couple of good reasons for doing this.  For one, there's a QR code on the jacket of my book.  You can use it to check for updates, find out where I am or if I'm lost.  You can even use it to let me know if you're lost.  We're pretty excited to have the first book published in at least North America (possibly the world) with such a feature.  Also, QR codes will play a role in some of the fun activities I'm hoping to mount over the spring and summer.  If you play you can win some nice prizes, including signed copies of my book and a few other things as well.  If you want to get started early, you can get involved by sending me short stories of your own wayfinding fiascos.  Where have you been lost?  Where are the Bermuda triangles of your own life?  Is there a place where you always seem to lose your bearings?  What the worst thing that ever happened to you because you lost your way?  All entries will be eligible to be entered in a weekly draw for a free signed book.  Particularly clever or creative entries may be selected for larger book prizes.  You can enter the contest in all kinds of ways.  Send me a tweet at the official Twitter site for the book.  Post a comment on this site.  Send me an email. Extra points awarded for photos, maps, or other cool geo-info.

MacMashup

Ok.  It's really very late.  And I have a completely spinorky five year old on my hands who will not go to bed.  But he loves LOVES LOVES the videos that the HarperCollins whiz kids have put together to help promote my upcoming book.  I think he loves them more than me.  He can't stop looking at them.  I think it must be the crazy swaying buildings.  So in this spirit, I let him participate in a little mashup.  My son.  Now on YouTube.  But going to bed any day now.

Video proof that I am here. Wherever that is.

A few weeks ago, I told some of my colleagues that my comrades at HarperCollins who are helping to market my forthcoming book had suggested we shoot some video of me standing in the middle of one of Canada's busiest intersections.  They wanted proof.  Here's the proof.

We've got a few more videos to put out over the next little while, not to mention some cool place puzzles, contests, prizes, and free stuff.  Did I mention the free stuff?  Stay tuned.  The fun is just beginning.

The biology of public space

Whenever I'm lucky enough to have a chance to bend the ear of an architect about my crazy ideas, I come away with new enthusiasm for how much untapped potential there is to connect architecture and psychology, and new humility about how much I just don't know.  I've written a couple of posts about my slow and painful education in Le Corbusian architectural theory -- a work still very much in progress -- and I had another small lesson when I had lunch with a sharp, young architect named Vincent Hui on Friday.  I say 'lunch', though somehow things got a bit out of hand.  After planning about three years of research we discovered that much of the afternoon had vanished behind us.  Time well spent.

I couldn't possibly summarize all of the ideas Vincent set in motion, but one that interested me a lot had to do with understanding how public space works.  I'm here slogging into an area of huge interest and attention, of course.  There is a long history of academic and practical interest in how such spaces work (or don't).  One thinks first of people like William Whyte, Jan Gehl, and Jane Jacobs, perhaps.  As I've mentioned before, my own bias about Le Corb, and I know I'm not alone, is that he got things really wrong.  If you throw buildings up on pillars to create big wide open spaces underneath them, people hate them.  When I said something like this at our lunch, Vincent leaned forward in his chair, fixed me with a look of some urgency and suggested that this was not always true.  Cryptically, he promised pictures.  Here's one now:

 This is an HSBC bank in Hong Kong.  You can see enough to understand that it's an open space underneath a building, in a manner befitting LeCorb, but it is also obviously working as a public space.  Not only public, but exuding such comfort as a refuge that occupants are not only sitting on beautiful little blankets to enjoy picnics and conversations, but they're actually snuggling up and falling asleep.  This is nothing like the Pruitt-Igoe-high-crime-crack-pipe-shards-of-broken-glass images that we normally conjure up when we think of the failure of Radiant City.

So why does this happen here and not, for example, here?

Or here?

Well, where do we begin?  Density?  Maybe.  The Foster Bank in Hong Kong is in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.  Pruitt-Igoe was never even fully occupied in its heyday.

But there's much more to it than that.  We all know about public spaces that work and ones that don't.  Think of where you live.  Think of a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in the core of your city.  What places are empty and which ones are teeming with people?  Much, you might argue, would have to do with what's around you.  But underneath a bank on Hong Kong?  What's there?  

What about biology?  In psychology, there's a classic old test called the "open field test".  It's hard to imagine anything simpler.  Plonk an animal into an open space of some kind and see what it does.  The first thing you'll discover is that any self-respecting animal has strong and quickly developing place preferences.  Other than some very simple things, though, such as that many animals prefer dark places and places where they are close to a wall, we know very little about how such preferences develop.  We assume (and make the argument sometimes) that these kinds of preferences must relate to survival.  Animals probably prefer the spaces that are most likely to be safe from predators, aggressive neighbours, the environment.  

When Filipino domestics in Hong Kong go out for an urban Sunday picnic, they're probably not worrying about predators or typhoons, but they're still led to make choices about where to spread those colourful blankets by deeply in-built impulses that propel them towards comfort.  So one of the differences between public spaces that work and those that fail seems likely to me to have to do with preferences for size, shape and appearances of spaces.  Understanding how to tap into those preferences to build successful public spaces might be helped along by adopting a more biological approach to how we apprehend spaces, and then doing the experiments to establish the general principles.  Time to get busy.

Canada's new minister of science and technology?

Overheard conversation between my five year old son and his five year old sister on the drive home from pre-school today:

Boy:  "Did you know that the dinosaurs and Einstein lived at the same time?"

Girl: "Einstein?  Who's that?"

Boy: "He's that big turtle."

I learn new stuff every day.

Space, place, and the AGO transformation

I finally had a chance to visit the new Art Gallery of Ontario this weekend to have a look at the new Frank Gehry addition.  After an unfortunately not entirely positive reaction to the other big-name archi-revamp in Toronto, the ROM Crystal by Daniel Libeskind, I confess I was braced for the worst.  I visited under the best possible conditions.  I had arrived in Toronto on Friday, sans gaggle of offspring, avec lovely partner in crime where we lolled around in the cavernous bar at the Intercontinental (gotta love Hotwire) deconstructing the perfect martini.  There was nothing on the slate for Saturday other than feeding ourselves delicious things, visiting the gallery, and hunting down some good music.  I can't remember the last time my agenda looked like that.  Anyway...my mind is now wandering space and time...so back to the AGO.

I'm not going to rabbit on here about Gehry's beautiful sinuous curves, the astonishing masses of Douglas Fir, or the clever staircases.   Others have poured heart and soul into that effort.  I'm actually more interested in how people move through spaces and how they feel as they do so.  The attentive reader might have already noticed this about me.

First, art galleries in general:  for people interested in space and movement, they're the perfect kinds of spaces.  Unlike spaces such as shopping malls, libraries, casinos, offices, hospitals, or government buildings, there's really only one reason we visit a gallery:  to look.  My old friend Thomas Seebohm used to describe galleries as the "teapots of architecture".  What he meant by this might only be obvious to those readers who know something about computer graphics.  A classic reference object  for computer graphic modeling and rendering of three-dimensional objects has been the teapot.  If you can render its surfaces, curves and reflections in a convincing manner, then you've got a good 3-d model.  In the same way, if you can make a gallery work, then you've got a good space.

That's how I approached the new AGO.  Where did I want to go, and how did I feel when I got there?  As we passed through the entryway, craning our heads to take in as much of the complex, curvy organic warmth of the wood as we could (but I won't go there), I immediately began to feel a bit of rising tension.  The source of it, I think, was a greedy concern that I not miss anything. Where's the contemporary stuff?  Where's the Impressionism?  What new Canadian art is here?  Are there some traveling exhibits that I won't be able to see next time I visit? This slight art-angst (where's the Munch?) was probably exacerbated by the fact that this AGO was an entirely new version of an old gallery that I have been visiting on a regular basis for about 40 years (more about this in a moment).  Suddenly, a space that I have known pretty well for a long time has been reorganized, but it retains many of the old objects that I've grown to know over much of my life.  It didn't take me very long at all to discover that what the transformation is all about is breaking down those kinds of traditional approaches to a gallery space by refusing to categorize art in the conventional manner.  Instead, pieces have been put together to stimulate thought about art, rather than to encourage visitors to go look for their favourite iconic artworks so they can tick them off a mental list like birders going after the rare Black-Faced Spoonbill.  So for example, one of the most brilliant spaces for me was one in which one wall was literally plastered with a large number of well-known and much loved paintings hung Academy style, while the wall facing it was carefully arranged with a sparse collection of beautiful Impressionist paintings.  At the same time we're admiring the pictures, we're confronted with an interesting epoch in art history.  What does the contrast mean?  What do the changes in the ways that we present art have to say about how we feel about art?

Another example:  In the contemporary galleries, pieces are arranged chronologically.  As we walk through the collections, we move through time, make connections with the context in which the art was being made.  Instead of looking for common uses of materials, techniques and methods, we're looking for repeating ideas and themes.

As a repeat visitor to the gallery, and one who can connect much personal history to the space (everything from grade school excursions, bus rides from hell, illicit cigarettes sneaked outside the back door to visits with wan and willowy young companions when I was a pretentious university student wearing a safety pin in my ear), I was fascinated by the fact that re-arrangement according to new devices, new categories of thought shook loose all of these memories, separated the personal context of my viewing from the work itself in a wonderfully jarring way, and stimulated thought.

But beyond the personal, I loved the fact that what the AGO has done is to make the arrangement of spaces and the objects that it contains into a series of pieces of conceptual art.  Even though I've spent a decent amount of time talking to curators, and have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the process works, it was a deep epiphany for me to see curation as such a fundamental and transformative creative act.  The curation has actually changed the art.    That's what Gehry has unleashed here.

The marketplace of place

There's a sad little platial drama playing out in my town -- Kitchener, Ontario.  We've had a farmer's market in the centre of town for well over a hundred years.  In fact, Kitchener boasts one of the oldest continuing farmer's markets in the country. The market has resided in various locations through the city, but in my years of living here, it has been in only two places.  First, in Kitchener Market Square -- a moribund downtown shopping centre that was built in 1973, mostly vacated by merchants over the years as commercial development migrated to the exurbs where operating costs were much lower because taxpayers were footing the bill for much of their infrastructure.  More recently, beginning in 2004, the market moved to a new space right on Kitchener's main street (King Street) in a gigantic multi-level building that ended up costing a small fortune.  The concept was that the traditional Saturday market would be supplemented by a retail and restaurant space that would operate every day, draw a good lunch crowd and possibly some daily food shoppers for gourmet items.  When I read of this plan, it seemed to me like a no-brainer.  The organic and locavore movement was just beginning to pick up some steam, the market was easily accessible and central, and to me the idea of being able to go grab a quick lunch and then maybe pick up some good coffee beans or some cheese to take home seemed like exactly the thing a growing city should offer.  Yet in the five years of its existence, I've visited the Kitchener Market exactly twice at times other than Saturday morning.  And my experience is not an isolated one.  The market is just not doing well.  Why?

Compared to our much larger market situated squarely in Mennonite country in St. Jacobs, the little urban market attracts a decent but much less impressive Saturday crowd.  When I go, I actually like this because it's not as hard to move from aisle to aisle, find the things I need, and even to stake out a little spot to stand and eat something delicious on offer from one of the few restaurant stalls that operates on the main market floor.  I have no idea whether the main market space is doing better or worse than in its old location, but I do know that the upper floor, housing the permanent restaurants and stores, is foundering.  It seems like such a good idea until you arrive at the site.  First, the opening to the market building is a large, empty piazza.  It's just not an inviting space that reels me in and makes me want to linger.  But more importantly, for all of the efforts that were made to make the upper space cheery, inviting, and in keeping with a market atmosphere, it just seems to make the space act like one that I want to rush out of rather than cling to.  The large, vaulted skylit ceiling and the wrap-around windows seem to take away any semblance of coziness or refuge.  The exposed surfaces, almost all consisting of concrete and metal, don't help.  The food is actually quite good and there is good variety, but having purchased a delicious order of jerk chicken or some rib-sticking Croatian fare, when I get to my table, I just want to gulp it down and flee.  It's very much the same feeling as having lunch at a food court in a shopping mall.  These are not spaces that are designed to encourage us to linger and relax so much as to bolt down some sustenance and to go back into the shopping fray.

Now there's a new manager for the market, who says that she's going to try to figure out how to make the upper retail and restaurant space more compelling.  She says she is going to "warm it up and make it very comfortable to be there."  Encouraging that she seems to have put her finger on the problem exactly.  But how to fix?  Can shuffling the purpose of the space, filling it with cooking demonstrations, community group meetings, and a mini-market accomplish this, or does the configuration of the space itself need some more radical surgery?  It's a fascinating problem and one I hope finds a solution.  I'm a firm believer in urban markets and local foods, and I know I'm far from alone.  I want to want to go there, but right now I don't.