Get your dog off my lawn
Jane Jacobs’s reading really intrigued me because I am so used to reading scholarly articles or readings written by professional architects. It is a nice change to listen to a new perspective by someone not in the architecture profession who just has the viewpoint of a citizen. I thought it was funny how she mentioned the human race loves chaos. We really do when you think about it. We often design boring and orderly architecture to fit into our desire “utopian” atmospheres, but they never stand for long in that sense. A family occupies a home and it becomes disordered and messy, and some people thrive off of this liveliness. The same goes for a city or park. We design landscape to be this perfect layout and imagine our own families and pets peacefully strolling through, but in reality they can be occupied by the homeless, dogs do their business all over our perfectly cut grass, and kids run around and destroy flower beds or make a scene when they throw a tantrum. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I love watching this chaos from the sidewalk. This is how the human race interacts and we need to keep this perspective since we are the ones setting the stage for the madness.
Molly, I agree with Jane Jacobs as well in that humans love chaos. When I think of "chaotic places" I think of street markets, times square on new years eve, I think of amusement parks, of shopping centers, of Piccadilly circus. I think of places in which I could sit for hours and just watch all the different kinds of people walk by and go about their lives. I believe this is so because we find comfort in human interaction and in sharing our experiences with others. I believe this is something we can take into consideration when designing spaces. Instead of creating perfect paths or walkways that lead to our building we could create something more dynamic that promotes more interaction between people.
ReplyDeleteMolly, I agree - I believe that chaos is deeply rooted in the everyday and therefore, the city and its architectural language should uphold, respond to, and function with the everyday (and its chaos). We shouldn't worry about being orderly or try to maintain an architecture separate from the events and identity of public streets, etc., instead we should embrace the chaos and design for it.
ReplyDeleteI love reading Jane Jacobs because she has some great insights but doesn't try to spoon feed them to her readers. She is very personable when she writes and is also usually spot on in her observations. It is also nice to get feedback from someone who isn't in a design field. I never put much thought into sidewalk design, but I definitely see the merit in focusing on this in my own designs. I am beginning to realize that it is a missed design opportunity.
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