Borderlands

Hudson Yards

    A design decision we almost all come across is the development of our public spaces within our project. More likely than not, our design portfolio will be filled by projects where the decision of threshold and ownership would need to be made. Restaurants need to define the "public" dining room away from the private kitchen. Stores define the client area away from staff and storage. Large corporate buildings separate their public functions away from their private employees and operations. 

    Even more, defining space as clearly public or private has become much more difficult to do with many modern developments. Developers, owning a space of land privately (such as Hudson Yards/the Vessel/etc.) are designed to appear open, but only to specific clientele. The space might be physically open, but people who are considered undesirable may be removed, classifying the space as private. These unclear edges, the borderlands, are a wide area of design potential for resolving conflict and providing space for those who may not belong. 

     In my own design methodology, I find it is important to provide these kinds of spaces, regardless of the potential program of the overall space. It may be as simple as providing a plaza area outside the space, but it may also be implementing specific services and programs into certain areas of the building to make them "open" or accessible. Interstitial spaces provide a unique opportunity to welcome people into a space.