Citizen Architect

Everyday Urbanism has gotten me to think about the disconnect between architectural design and public space.  On one hand you have designers eager to create spaces to be used by the people, but on the other hand we have an end product that is a contrived space with little life.  This begs the question of why do we struggle to design public space?  Is it possible that we over-design public space, that we try to insert a program and generate an activity versus allowing for spontaneity.   As Crawford puts it " These efforts implicitly accept urban pluralism as the inspiration for urban design and architecture - they incorporate, for example, increasingly diverse activities and multilayered visual complexities, all intended to promote spontaneity - but they have invariably been constricted by the control mechanism inherent in the mall.  So then I wonder, are designers okay with empty space and do we associate this void as bad?

I think back to my undergraduate studies at Appalachian State University and something that I felt was so interesting about the school was this big public green called Sanford Mall.  It was the residual space left between several academic buildings, it wasn't programmed to be anything special, that I know of, and yet it was the heart of the university activity.  Almost everyone in the school crossed the mall daily and it was teeming with life.  In the warmer months you would see slacklines, hammocks, frisbee, sunbathers, etc.  In the winter you would see snowmen, snowball fights, etc.  What made it so great was that in the density of the campus you had this open space where anything was possible.  Campus protests and demonstrations even happened here.  I once had a juror tell me that successful architecture involves doing the least amount possible.  Do we as designers all too often over do it?

 Yes, we even had bouncy castles