The weather outside may be changing human behavior, but it is the built environment that can significantly alter our experiences and perceptions. The spaces and materials we encounter can be cold or hot, calm or jarring, comforting or upsetting, invigorating or discouraging, familiar or strange. Sometimes we wrestle against a street, sidewalk, or building, not unlike a gust of wind or driving rain. In more desirable circumstances, we are wrapped by our surroundings like a warm breeze. Our thoughts and feelings are shaped by the process, and it can be a subtle thing. Year after year, passing by a broken or depressing bus stop on the way to work; week after week buying groceries in a cavern lacking even a single window; morning after morning watching ourselves brush teeth by the ghoulish light of a glaring light bulb. It’s not offensive enough to impose upon conscious thought, and in this way can be all the worse: We suffer these small indignities unawares, fraying some unnamed part of ourselves like a flag left flapping in the wind. We may sense its absence once it is gone, but we won’t know when or how we lost it. On the other hand, sitting on the wide marble steps of a dignified public building can be satisfying. Hearing the dull thud of a library book returned to the drop box on the way home, a comfort. Encountering a weathered seaside fortification makes the needs and aspirations of other generations seem clear, recognizable, and worthy of consideration. When forms and spaces in the public domain compete with and contradict one another, it is a reminder that there can be little consensus — ever — about what any particular place might mean. These secrets make a careful investigation of public spaces, public art, and public architecture frequently rewarding. Every other week, it will be my good fortune to use this space to examine some structures and installations accessible to all of us, coaxing them to divulge a few of their secrets. Some of these may be dark or depressing or unflattering, and some will be just the opposite. Either way, the looking tends to be instructive. Architectural History and Preservation
My training is with architectural history and historic preservation of architecture, so my inclination is toward constellations and patterns more than isolated overachievers. I teach contemporary art history at the Maine College of Art and Design and at the University of Southern Maine, so I am keen to hear what the bleeding edge of artists working in the public sphere have to say for themselves. What do they care a lot about? What images or issues are worth the enormous expense and trouble and energy required to produce a new piece of public art? Does the treatment of these images and issues seem compelling and worthwhile, or confusing and disenchanting? Demands on the Public Domain
It seems reasonable to demand a lot from the public domain. After all, Maine taxpayers contribute much to its evolution, appearance, and upkeep. It should be, at its best, convivial, solid, edifying, inclusive, and affordable. It should often be pleasurable, and should encourage informal social interactions. It should be much more than a space for commerce, recreation, and transit, it should suggest something greater than the sum of its parks. It should constantly be getting better. The Potential for Improvement
A good design may be transferred and translated into countless, equally good specimens wherever the needs and constraints are similar. There can be no good excuse for sustained ignorance of a successful solution to a common problem. Take, for example, a versatile and convenient reading lamp. We can imagine a lamp made of durable and attractive materials that is so versatile, so adjustable, so well-balanced on a table, so consistently useful in its simple capacity to throw the right amount of light where it’s needed. Proper lighting is a deeply personal matter, but for myself, I imagine a metal and Bakelite lamp with two ball-and-socket joints that allow me to point the beam wherever I wish. Perhaps yours is a lava lamp or disco ball. Now, let us take this perfect instrument and mass produce it, driving its cost down and ensuring, one hopes, that it could become affordable to most. Open source blueprints would encourage manufacturers to make ongoing improvements and efficiencies to its design without subtracting anything from its excellent function. In this way, every enthusiastic reader would have easy access to a nearly ideal reading lamp, every dancer a nearly ideal disco ball, and so forth. Going forward, every new lamp design would be naturally expected to be as good as these models, if not just a little bit better. Never worse. How could it be worse? We already have the almost-perfect lamp sitting on our living room table. If we substitute a house for the lamp, we encounter stubborn difficulties. Should it not be the case that each new house, or hotel, or gas station, or office building, or school, is as good, if not just a little bit better, than the best example yet known? Is it not possible to identify these near-perfect templates, wherever they are found in the world, and email their blueprints to a willing contractor? How can the progress of design not inevitably ratchet itself forward, only forward, with the teeth of the ratchet “catching” at the last and highest point of accomplishment, refusing backward movement or the repetition of feeble, partial, or discredited solutions? A Different Approach
Discussion of design, especially design in the public domain, can diverge quickly into discrete camps. One camp looks at effective, thoughtful design as a reward for the wealthy, an upgrade to business class, a kind of dessert brought to the table of those who have finished their dinner and who wish to indulge a little. A luxury — and rare. This is the conventional, and undeniably elitist, approach favored by capitalism in which everything lovely and beautiful is granted to those who can pay for it. The other camp looks at good solutions as foundational, essential, primary, and potentially universal. I prefer to dwell in the second camp. I look forward to lamp-hunting with you, through fair weather or foul. This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.