Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Quote of the day: architecture is a public art, but should be an art of connection

From John Massengale, via email:

... This is similar to the "autonomous architecture" taught today at Architecture Art schools like Columbia. "Don't worry about the buildings around yours," the students are told, "those will change over time. Make your building consistent with its own rules."

And this continues the object-oriented anti-urban architecture of so much of the last 50 years.

Architecture is a public art that must be about making places and the public realm. One can choose to go to or not to go to MOMA or the the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery, which frees the artist to do whatever he or she wants.

But the buildings themselves alter the experience of every person who passes them on the street. For those people we must make places where they want to be, not places that express the self, or ego, of the artist.

And recent research that the architectural qualities that make places where people feel good and therefore want to be are rather simple. The expression of the artist's ego and the making of object-oriented buildings are not among those qualities.

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