Continuing the Enlightened Spaces conversation…
Our Enlightened Spaces event last night was an enormous success thanks to incredible presenters and a thoughtful and diverse audience. Architect, public artist, audio designer, landscape architect–each talked about ways they make public spaces inspiring and engaging. Topics included the public place as “stage,” the question of who “owns” public art, and the role of urban designer as a facilitator of community culture. But at the end, the burning question from the audience had to do with community–who is “community” and what is the community’s appropriate role in the creation of public spaces? What is the role of the expert, whether artist or designer? If you came to the event, what did you take away? If you missed it, feel free to jump into the conversation anyway!
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I attended the lecture and woke the next morning with this question:
Temporal Art - Andy Goldsworthy creates temporal art in nature, highlighting, contrasting with natural settings. His pieces can come and go and the beauty of the space is not necessitated by his art. How do we achieve this in our designed spaces? How do we create spaces that accommodate temporal art without leaving a void in the design when the temporal art pieces are no longer there? What happens to the stage once the actors have left?
I really enjoyed the emphasis on making public spaces hospitable to all people. Over the past few years, most public space in downtown San Francisco has been skate proofed. Can anyone suggest an example of an urban space with a mixture of skaters and non-skaters?
Community engagement means many different things to different people… It can be a loaded catch-phrase to which people attach all kinds of expectations, and establishing a shared understanding of that meaning is an important foundation for a successful process – regardless of the scope of the project. After the event, I was reading the new issue of Exhibitionist (a journal published by the National Association for Museum Exhibition) on BART on the way home. Coincidentally this issue focuses on visitor-generated content and design, and an article by Daniel Spock of the Minnesota History Center Museum included these words of wisdom: “If you invite people to really participate in the making of a museum, the process must change the museum.” Equally applicable to public spaces of all kinds.
I thought Enlightened Spaces was fantastic. I enjoyed the diversity of viewpoints from your panelists and from the audience. I was fascinated at some of the interpretations of what community and public spaces can be. What amazed me, was how this sort of dialogue seems to always come back to the eternal questions of “what defines community?” and “how can a project utilize community input, so that it is constructive and serves the end goal?” It seems like the answers to both of these questions vary from project to project.
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