Experiencing a sense of community – belonging to a successful network of human alliances – is one of the great pleasures of the places we build.  And at village or at city scales we dedicate an enormous share of our resources to accommodate and symbolize the group’s protection, effectiveness, and cohesion.  Facing the propensity for destruction and violence that’s inherent in person-to-person competition, we strengthen bonds and loyalties with places to meet, act out our agreements and shared stories, resolve the inevitable conflicts and plant symbols of our “social contract” – the places to eat together, judge, worship, trade, play, and celebrate with shared movements, ideas, voices. and action – and finally in the burial grounds that record the continuity of the shared gene pools.

“The Greek theater where a city saw and heard itself being a community – sharing its myths, passions and history”

Civil society’s most honored monuments are the places where a community can read the stories of individual competitors surviving and prospering together – stories of victories, resolved conflicts, bonds of loyalty, generosity and philanthropy, and the favor of a deity. It’s seen in the bold, arrogant commercial and town hall towers of medieval Europe’s newly independent cities – with their symbolism of wealth and power that’s inherent in penetrating a skyline. Today we do the same. We announce our stability and pedigree in the neo-classical languages of power – in finance, universities, and governments – or the engineering of grand transportation infrastructure and waterfronts that tell stories of still larger geographical alliances. And the most moving are the places where citizens see – and hear – themselves being a community, sharing the passions stirred by their myths, arts, and on-going history – the Greeks in their intimate theaters or today’s crowds in museums or performing arts venues. And it can happen in parks, plazas, and arenas where spectacles, music, or sports – at small and large scales – evoke feelings of solidarity, working or fighting side-by-side as a team or as a gang, making connections just as binding – at least for the moment – as genetic kinship. These places where we reinforce and celebrate – respond to – our prospering alliances are the settings where we experience what we call “sense-of-place” and “authentic” communities.

Alienation

In any mix of diverse and mobile populations, under any social structure, the built environments, the public faces of places financed and occupied, naturally express the victories, values, religion or status of the winners. When, for better or worse, they also become symbols of exclusion and oppression, they become physical targets for the outsiders – called, naturally, barbarians, rebels or terrorists. They have been throughout history. And in our globalizing, urbanizing settlements we can expect continued destructive responses to the places we build.  The alienation is just as deeply felt as “belonging,” and the winners are responding as they always have, with hardened perimeters and surveillance – refuge and prospect.

Read more…

With apologies to real estate agents, we’d like to say that the three most important factors in design are scale, scale, and scale. One reason is that many of the worst environmental design blunders of the 20th century have been mistakes of scale — especially our failures to come to terms with the linked nature of scales, ranging from small to large. The cumulative consequence of these failures is that the scales of the built environment have become highly fragmented, and (for reasons we detail here) this is not a good thing. Can we correct this shortcoming?

Most designers know something about “fractals,” those beautiful patterns that mathematicians like Benoît Mandelbrot have described in precise structural detail. In essence, fractals are patterns of elements that are “self-similar” at different scales. They repeat a similar geometric pattern in many different sizes. We see fractal patterns almost everywhere in nature: in the graceful repetition at different scales of the fronds of ferns, or the branching patterns of veins, or the more random-appearing (but repetitive at different scales) patterns of clouds or coastlines.

Figure 1. The beautiful structure of fractals, patterns that are repeated and sometimes rotated or otherwise transformed at different scales. Left, a natural example of ice crystals (Photo: Schnobby@wikimediacommons). Right, a computer-generated fractal coral reef that, helped by color and shading effects, could be mistaken for a natural scene (Photo: Prokofiev@wikimediacommons).

Read more…

After mounting a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper at Rockefeller Center in 2008, and then placing a diverse collection of vintage streetlights like lit columns at a main entry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), artist Chris Burden astounds us again. LACMA presents Chris Burden’s Metropolis II.

1100 miniature cars race along 18 lanes of traffic around 25 buildings. Given the miniature scale, they speed the equivalent of about 230 miles per hour. 13 trains mosey along through this mini-city as well.

Read more…