City Squares: What is it that makes a city square work?

So, what is it that makes a city square work?

The website for the Project for Public Places has a page listing the World's Best and Worst Parks and that also includes a list of the best and worst City Squares or Plazas. Evaluating spaces and placemaking is what PPS is all about. The PPS website introduces the project thus:

PPS was founded in 1975 to expand on the work of William (Holly) Whyte, the author of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Since then, we have completed projects in over 2500 communities in 40 countries and all 50 US states. Partnering with public and private organizations, federal, state and municipal agencies, business improvement districts, neighborhood associations and other civic groups, we improve communities by fostering successful public spaces. In its broadest application, Placemaking is a catalyst for building healthy, sustainable and economically viable cities of the future.

This list is nearly ten years old but it offers a good starting point for thinking about park and squares in the context of your project.



When evaluating the new public spaces in Liverpool 1 in 2008, the e-space lab project used the Capitoline Hill in Rome, designed by Michelangelo, as an examplar for the way an aesthetic programme of proportion, pattern and interval can shape an experience of space as harmonious and pleasurable.



This is perhaps an example of a public space, in itself capable of being experienced as a work of public art. This type of space will therefore appeal to a modernist sensibility except that it draws people in, it attracts people, whilst modernism tends to repel or exclude the human presence (see below).



Michelangelo humanizes a space whereas in the image of the perfect spaces of the imagined Renaissance Utopian City, human beings, messy, untidy, uncontrollable, possibly awkward and ugly and therefore excluded in order not to disturb the logical equilibrium of this perspectival space.

A Piazza for everything and everything in its Piazza as Marshall Mcluhan put it in  The Medium is the Massage.

Modernist spatial conceptions in many instances have a tendency to emphasize a pure spatial quality that works with the emptiness and fullness of spaces and prefers that they remain uncluttered by people and the activities they might get up to in the everyday formation of social fabric. For someone like Mies van der Rohe this is explainable if you connect his created spaces to the aspect of Romanticism that reveals a significant preference for nature over humanity, as in 'high mountains are a feeling, the hum of human cities torture'.

“I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me: and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
of human cities torture.” ― George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

If we consider a classic Ludvig Mies van der Rohe piazza like the platform for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin it is possible to see in this example a stage for architectural spectacle with the drama concentrated in the viewpoint of the individual and atomized observer.





Photos of this site trend to exclude documentation of the human presence. This editorial imperative flows from the way spaces in this architecture are to be taken primarily in visual terms. It is a framing thing, just as the photograph is a response to this implicit and pure spatial framing, unsullied by the incidents of everyday life, the platform and stage occupied by the main actor(s), the gallery's top deck!



But this photograph is more representative of the urban interactions going on in this part of Berlin. Urban fabric and social fabric! Traffic! No place to settle! It is a vast threshold. An outside for looking inside!



This is how people on the outside use the whole platform, using the transitional space between outside and inside that Tadao Ando often references in his embedding of the architectural in natural environment. This zone has a name in traditional Japanese architecture. Engawa (縁側) is a Japanese term that refers to the raised wooden platform that connects inside and outside in vernacular forms of building. Giving a type of zonal and spatial structure a name is significant, literally! For Mies van der Rohe such a zone would encourage a type of human occupation that would encourage actors to look out from the stage and miss out on appreciating the building in its setting as an artwork.



The gallery's top deck is a nightmare for showing artworks as they ending up cluttering the space which demands to be 'emptied'. However, if artists use the space then it is another matter.



For example Rudolf Stingel's installation in 2010.

Or, the work by Jenny Holzer, that integrates into the structure so well that it ramps up the phenomenon of spectacle to a degree where the philosophic message evaporates and is replaced by a sort of trance like absorption in "Art"with a capital "A"! Pure bourgeois ideology for my money, except, as William Blake writes 'Where any view of money exists art cannot be carried on but war only'! But Blake was thinking about art as being the whole business of humankind!





What about Vanessa Beecroft's performance work? It works with the ideology of the building perfectly. Chilling! Thirty degrees below flirtation! With resonances I dare not mention! We all need to get out more! Talking of getting out more, two more photographic references in relation to the Neue Nationalgalerie and its urban setting and then this post will move on. 

Empty spaces are good for architectural photography, riding your bike and skateboarding! See how skateboarding can be used an urban space evaluating activity in the next post.