High School in Maine Creates Spatial Experiences: 3

The endless high school hallway. It's even shown up in my dreams. At the end is doors to gym; turn left and up a few stairs and down more hallway to doors to the parking lot. Most kids in Maine grow up with this space as a dominant experience in their lives. Every weekday life's most intense moments may happen in such a space. Monotonous for the most part, hermetic and claustrophobic, moving through such a space can imprint a linear, film-like space/time memory of planning.

They're so introverted.

Such stale experience could stifle the creativity of our future planners. The double loaded corridor is always forcing it's super efficient layout on design. In the photo above, the lucky students actually get light at the end of the tunnel. Like the train tracks of the Industrial Revolution, we are forced to take only one path submissively. The same attitude led to the elevated highways crashing through our delicate pedestrian fabric and Jacobs battling Moses.

But in a true village there would be one library for everyone in town and students in all grades, and you would walk to it from a classroom building. Spatial experience would vary moving from place to place in the course of a day. Performances would take place in which ever size auditorium in the center that was the right size for the event whether it was a grade school day time event or a community night time one. This is not to say grade schools would not have their own dedicated spaces, just that buildings in town would be shared by all and not wasted, lying empty at times and built cheap because they are not important to all.

Our Maine towns should slice and dice this endless hallway by building separate buildings like a village with connected covered walkways where used often creating courtyards, town squares and landscapes for yankee pedestrian delight.

Moses parts the urban fabric

I just finished reading Anthony Flint's excellent account of the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses for the urban fabric of NYC. Post war America saw the existing urban fabric of cities as stale garbage compared to the huge infrastructure going up based on the automobile as the primary mode of transportation and the utopian life the commuting world would bring. The impulse to "clean" up areas of "decay" is a natural instinct but of course, we ended up destroying large pieces of neighborhood fabric and making gettos of under and around elevated expressway areas.

Thanks to people like Jacobs who saw the world from a human perspective, communities banded together to save the human based streetscape as a working prototype thousands of years old. Moses, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, built many models where he could look down from the detached view of an airplane and admire the sweeping forms of concrete and tar slithering through the city, raised high above the ordinary human on foot. Riding in a chauffeur driven limo since he was a boy, his view of a better world was one in which he yielded ultimate power and could use his superior education and personality to help the simple little people who knew nothing. Feeling superior was natural for him and he never failed to feed his ego to the point where real harm to society began to take place.

Jacobs owned a home she liked and wanted her neighborhood to stay personable and friendly and bubbling with activity based on the movement of the human body through space and the one to one conversations possible in these circumstances. Her view was one of a mother with a home in a humanistic environment enmeshed in the people around her. She was very assertive and this helped propel her to the foreground of community leadership. She formed the perfect foil to Moses' assertive bureaucrat.

Now that we are looking for new infrastructure projects to revitalize our cities it is important to stop categorizing forces into pro-neighborhood and pro-development. We must simply acknowledge that we are happiest in human environments that are safe and allow us the maximum interaction with others and to grow old in our homes, and thus, walk to everything. And that we need to continue to build and modify and tear down things to make a more wonderful series of neighborhoods.

There is no rule that says we have to build more than 4 stories high or have any elevators. There is no rule that says we can't tear down some buildings to make a nice park or community space.

When we put ourselves as humans above ourselves as consumers, we all win.