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:
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.
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