After our lecture today about
Everyday Urbanism by Margaret
Crawford, I was left thinking about the strategies vs. tactics of Clemson
tailgates. Clemson is a campus that was inspired by the beautiful rolling hill
landscape surrounding it, however during football season this landscape gets
invaded by cars that park on top of the grass for tailgating. What we do as
architects (solving problems and creating spaces for people to live better)
directly affects how people use spaces, and in turn even if the strategies are
bad the tactics make the spaces much better. It’s impossible to imagine the
design of a campus if you can’t picture what happens on gameday and how it will
be used. We are left with the final question: are architecture and urban
planning tactical or strategic?
I think they can and should be both. In the case of tail-gating we can look at the layout of other universities. A lot of ivy league schools and schools that don’t have large athletic programs are arranged very methodically and picturesque, like a British estate garden. You wouldn’t imagine their pristine quads and courtyards being taken over to such a degree, so to some extent it almost is by design. Clemson’s designating swaths of temporary real estate equivalent to a week per year timeshare is strategic, yet was strategized around a tactic (tail-gating culture).
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