Public Works - Public Space

Architecture is all around us, we don’t realize it, but it’s there. It takes form of buildings, interiors, objects, art and space. As people we become part of the architecture through how we live within these public and private spaces, how we interact with those around us and how we adapt to what’s in the spaces surrounding us.

Public life is how we perceive and move within spaces of public and private. There is the idea that City=House and House=City, which is the idea that the activities we perform I different public spaces in the city, is the same as being at home in private spaces. The idea that these spaces in the city is the same as the the spaces at home. They are places everywhere we go and each serves a different purpose. For example the cinema is a public pace of leisure. Everyone can go to this space and enjoy their own experience in private.

We have become obsessed with the concept of utopia-city vector of the imagination. Personally this concept intruiges me hugely and im interested in the various creations of a utopian city of the future. The way I see it, is that through the many variations of our future city, is that public space plays a huge part with less of the private and domestic domain. This manifests with the fact that todays technology is consistently growing with less privacy and more openness. With social networks, modern day technology and computer systems, we are able to see and share with other people’s thoughts and spaces. Forever creating and producing new ideas/concepts. All these become interwoven with eachother, building a structure of a utopian future city.

The idea of separating people socially comes from hundreds of years ago. An example is  the term ‘Polis’ used in the Ancient Greek. The term meaning a self governed city. Even the citizens were separated, only those within the city walls were considered, but then the concept was developed and classes were created. i.e. slaves and foreigners were not allowed to be part of society. Nowadays we have better communications due to different types of public space.  For example using my experiences of schooling brings up the concept of public space having and impact on how we interact with others around us. Being in private school before I cam here, I was surrounded by almost all people of one class within the space called Queen’s Gate School, but when moving to Canterbury in university the public space became bigger and encouraged interactions with all kinds of people of various classes ad backgrounds. On the whole public spaces such as the London underground bring people from different places together in one space, even though we don’t stop and converse with one another our paths are intertwined, bringing us together without thought.

This also links with the idea of how we adapt and respond to things that happen between us through the spaces we are in. as I’ve said before technology also plays a huge part in the idea. For example our modern cities such as New York and Hong Kong with their bright lights and media centered spaces, impact us and influence our thoughts, actions and how we perceive our personal thoughts on spaces around us. The private spaces then become almost public. Again referring back to the utopian concept, architects can’t get enough of the idea of creating a space, building, or city that would be out of the ordinary, something we would all fantasies, but in actual fact non of these utopian ideas would ever work in the real world.  Instead of what architecture is meant to be, about creating suitable spaces for certain purposes, we build buildings that are of what we desire making us selfish. This also verges on the concept of Rem Koolhaas’ term ‘bigness’. We don’t care that the building does not make sense, but instead we build a skyscraper to be taller than the others as if in a competition to be better than the other skyscraper. This leads to our modern cities consistently growing bigger and what we see as better, creating larger public spaces that surround and heavily influence people about the idea of what we desire, rather than people per sieving these spaces interpretation and using the spaces in their own way.

As a conclusion I see it as spaces are all around us, with each serving a different purpose and influencing us to act, interact, play and move in certain ways, depending on the space we chose to be in. We have our ideas about an ideal world, society and city, but not all these ideas can work in our world today. Architecture is about creating a space for a purpose, but are we getting carried away with new ideas/creations and getting lost in the imagination of an ideal world or a world in which we would prefer to live in? 

#2 City = House, House = City

Like the city the house can be a smaller version with the same concept. The city is full of public spaces where one can converse with others and enjoy various activities. There is a sense of a large community of civilisation. Whereas in the house a similar pattern can be formed, where there are different spaces within the house where various activities can be performed just like in the city. There is also a sense of community but at a much smaller and closer scale. The concept of housing can be seen as a grid creating rationality within the city. 

As the reader we are led through a continuous driven plot, where Marco Polo an explorer through is imagination vividly describes the cities he has visited in a dialogue with another character, the Emperor Kublai Khan. The book consists of tales depicting 55 cities. The places in which Polo has visited show people acting, depicting and considering things of no sense or in fact impossible.When talking Polo and Kahn speak different languages. This therefore gives the idea that both characters understand what the other says through the use of their own imagination and leaves the reader to open interpretation. When describing each city Polo uses objects from the city he is talking about. The structure of the book is in the form of a framing device, the idea of a story within a story, with the concept that plays with the language and the complexity of the cities. On the whole the whole idea of the stories told and the way that they are told gives the reader, architects and artists to in-visit each city in a surreal manner, leaving it to the imagination where there are no limits visualising how cities could be. The way Calvino writes makes us consistently curious to the physical manner of public spaces and how they can relate with modern day society.

Robert Fishman writes about the three famous visionaries Ebenezer Howard,Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and how they “hated the cities of their time” and how they only imagined of the ‘ideal city’ inviscid from the imagination of the three of them. The book is about how these three men dreamed of the perfect urban world consisting the ideal society.

“What is the ideal city for the twentieth century, the city that best expresses the power and beauty of modern technology and the most enlightened ideas of social justice?” - this was the question the three planners were trying to answer. Individually the three of them then came up with hundreds of models, drawings and plans in specific detail of each space within buildings such as offices, schools, transport systems and factories etc. within what they per sieved as the ‘new city’. Each then carried on writing and coming up with new creations towards their ideal city, as they were deeply unhappy with the old city.

“many people dream of a better world” - but this cannot be a definite concept, for example we can only dream of no more wars, but cannot stop it.