Impressing on Spaces

 I find Margaret Crawford’s idea of everyday urbanism to be a really fresh interpretation of how architecture can service the user. I find it interesting to try and define everyday life, and to try and design something that can enrich a person’s everyday life by the way they use it and the way they impress upon it. I think the architect should design spaces with a lot of flexibility to make them more moldable. The fact that users will use a space for something other than its intended purpose is immutable. An architect can’t constantly dictate what goes on in their building after it’s been designed, but they can design it to be durable and flexible so that it can patina over time with its many different users. It reminds me of Christopher Alexander’s passage about thick walls in “A Pattern Language” and how we should design homes with thicker walls so its inhabitants can carve out nooks, shelves and other such spaces that will become part of the space for the next user and so on.