domesticating our public landscape

‘All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home.’ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

This thesis questions whether the domestication of space within a dichotomous private/public, public/urban edge can create place for individual and community dwelling and expression.   I will test this hypothesis at three distinct sites in Providence, Rhode Island – a park bench on South Main Street, a metered parking space on Empire Street and the lower terrace at Prospect Terrace Park.

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In order to create place one needs to need something.  My favorite cafe became a place because I wanted a macchiato in the morning.  My kitchen became a place because I needed food.  As the macchiatos and meals accumulate so does the place-ness of the place.  I catch the name of my favorite barista, Jilian, and start to chat.  I put pictures on the fridge and hang herbs to dry above my stove.  I can start to tell when Jilian’s tired or having a great day; the edges of the photos start to curl after they’ve been up for awhile; dust settles on the crispy sage.

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I’m interested in the  ***   between domestic and public language, between domestic and public space, between domestic and public program.  What happens when my need to go to work (public/urban) intersects with my need for reflection (private/domestic), or my need for food (private/domestic) intersects with my need to walk (public/urban)?

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Development of the lower terrace of Prospect Terrace Park meets the need for private and communal gathering, hands-on, sensory engagement with the land, a reinforced connection between Congdon Street and Benefit Street, and the unification of the upper and lower terraces.

Temporary appropriation of the metered parking space on Empire Street and the park bench on South Main Street meets the psychological and physical need for creative reinterpretation of everyday urban infrastructure.

midterm precedents

floor plans

As I develop my thesis book I’ve been thinking about an appropriate template/device  to ‘house’ my thesis as it progresses – both visually, graphically and verbally since I’ll submit a thesis book in addition to final design proposals.  Since ‘home’ has been a consistent touchstone for me (documented, experimented with and explained in entries such as ‘first place’, ‘the place for tea’,  ‘inundation’, ‘things are not as they appear’, ‘a hostess in her realm’, ‘house’, ‘a drawer’, ‘melt, ‘dirt doilies’…) I think a domestic floor plan may provide the right framework for me.

I chose these 2 floor plans from the internet for different reasons.  One of them devotes the central artery of the home to closets and the ‘living’ space is located at the front of the house while the more active rooms are relegated to the back.  The layout is rectilinear and autonomous. With the exception of shared doors, one room can remain more or less independent from the neighboring room.

The other floor plan orients everything around the central living/dining room.  The bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms and rec room surround this core inner space in simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal dialogue.  There are no closets or laundry rooms.  Everything relates to the center.

awakened place

In order to create place one needs to need/want something.  My favorite cafe became a place because I wanted a macchiato in the morning.  My kitchen became a place because I needed food.  As the macchiatos and meals accumulate so does the place-ness of the place.  I catch the name of my favorite barista, Jilian, and start to chat.  I put pictures on the fridge and hang herbs to dry above my stove.  I can tell when Jilian’s tired or having a great day; the edges of the photos start to curl after they’ve been up for awhile; dust settles on the crispy sage.

I propose reappopriating symbols of domestication for the creation of urban, public place.  The lower terrace of Prospect Terrace Park provides space for a community kitchen garden interspersed with semi-private horti conclusi (enclosed gardens). The wall becomes the infrastructure for climbing vines.  ‘Sconces’ are set into the wall to illuminate the plants at night.  At this highest point alongside the planted/living stone wall I’ve located the collective veranda.  The two terraces are connected by the ‘trapdoor’ corridor north of the veranda.   All of these ‘rooms’ are connected by flights of stairs and ramps, much like how a rambling old house is stitched together.  The forgotten lower edge of this popular park on Providence’s Eastside  now becomes a place of individual and collective activity designed within the framework of the domicile.

house

 

a drawer

‘…nevertheless this is not a drawer that orders part of a system – if anything it is the drawer of a particular kind of remainder, suspended between significance and refuse.  The drawer could be said to belong to the household before it belongs to any one of its intimates, though perhaps every object in it could be taken in its singularity to speak to someone’s sole, yet now forgotten, experience…’

‘Reading a Drawer’ by Susan Stewart 

(from Architecture, Ethics and the Personhood of Place edited by Gregory Caicco)

landscapes of earthly delights

Tomorrow is the first spring semester review with my thesis panel.  Below is my most recent thesis statement/statement of intent:

thesis title: Landscapes of Earthly Delights

Three designs will be tested at three distinct sites in Providence, Rhode Island – a park bench, metered parking space and small urban park – to frame and promote sensory, phenomenological experiences of space that encourage delight.  It is fundamental to the investigation that the sites are rooted in the American vernacular as this is the land in which we publicly and collectively dwell. Within painted lines, graffiti-ed wooden slats and mangy lawn these sites also occupy the physical and psychic interstices of private/domestic, public/urban and historic/contemporary.  I posit that by re-appropriating space within this dichotomous edge these junctures can become fertile ground for creative and re-imagined inhabitation.

a note about the title of this post and exploration:

The title of this thesis, ‘Landscapes of Earthly Delights’, is borrowed from ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ (c.1490-1510 AD), a majestic triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch at the start of the Middle Ages.  In between the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire (500 AD) and the rise of the Renaissance (1300 AD), the Middle Ages was a period of instability and reinvention.  Out of this 800-year era the medieval garden was born, promoting self-sufficiency and a greater understanding of the cultivation of medicinal and edible plants. Today, at a similarly tumultuous time in human civilization, I believe the strategy and philosophy of the medieval garden, as well as other historical garden precedents, can offer relevant insight into how to reshape and rethink our relationship to and manipulation of the landscape. Unlike the triptych however, where humans are warned against earthly delights, my project suggests we celebrate them in all their ordinary and surreal grandeur.  

fallen moments

I collected these objects from the lower edge of Prospect Park, my primary thesis site.  There were other, less aesthetic things similarly strewn about – crumpled Heineken cans, a wet box of matches and an empty bottle of Freixenet sparkling wine wedged into a weep hole in the wall.  But moss, broken concrete, the tab of a red bull and a Valdo cork said enough. This is a site of growth, celebration and unknown encounters. People come here to hide, love, take pictures, mark, mourn.  As the topographically lower edge, the moments of above rest here.  Like a pant cuff becomes a repository for sand and gravel,  this bottom park edge is inadvertently a receptacle and recorder of the show above.

a hostess in her realm

my colleague's aunt in her home in warsaw, poland

the parapet

There’s a towering retaining wall/parapet at Prospect Park.  It serves a double function of both stony screen at the lower edge of the park and lookout ledge at the upper edge.  In thinking about theater and the stage, the line created by retaining wall/parapet simultaneously acts as the very end of one stage – where an actor might teeter and gesticulate out into the audience – and the very beginning of another stage – where the scrim falls gathering dust bunnies and backstage whispers.  And then it can easily flip, and lower edge becomes the end where the actor teeters and the upper edge becomes the beginning where scrim falls.

As I stood a few feet beyond this point of ending and beginning a man shouted out directions to his grandson above – he wanted to take a picture of him. The wind carried his words up and away from me so I couldn’t hear what he said but the boy placed his hand on the black iron parapet, momentarily unaware of me watching him from below.  When he saw me he gasped and jumped away from the edge.  He didn’t know he was being watched.  There, at one of the highest points in Providence, his grandfather, poised behind a camera, was the only person he expected to have watching him.  The city laid out before him.  He was in control of the view.  He was the audience, not the actor. Like the jolt when as a spectator you suddenly meet the actor’s gaze, the boy looked away, resumed his pose and pretended like nothing happened.

A few minutes later another man leaned against the fence as someone, who remained unseen, took a picture of him.  He didn’t notice me.  Again the backdrop of the city was the desired frame for the photo and experience.  As I left, now on the upper part of the park where this man and the boy and his grandfather had been I spotted a young woman staring out into the distance.  I watched her for several minutes and she barely moved.  I imagined that something about the anonymity of the sounds and grid of the city comforted her.  Her quiet, contaminated perch was the frame she needed to contemplate something.

Place.  Here.