4 vignettes for you to ponder

I don’t usually post (or at least I try not to) unfinished thoughts on the PLA Blog.  I’ve had a lot of fun playing with Tumblr as a microblogging/lifestreaming platform over the past couple of weeks, and it has really confirmed my appreciation of blog posts as focused essays that reflect a certain amount of thought and reflection on a topic.  As much as I’m addicted to Twitter, 140 character blasts really do have their limit as tools of expression.  As much as I love a good ringtone, there’s something to be said for a well produced song, and for that matter a well produced album.  Granularity, spontaneity and fragmentation have their place, but for me that place is not the PLA Blog.

All that said, sometimes I find myself stuck on a series of thoughts that I just KNOW are all related to one another and try as I might to figure out how to synthesize, distill, and squeeeeeeze them into one new, concise idea it just will not happen.  This is one of those moments, so I’ll share with you four little vignettes that I know are related to one another and are formative little tetris blocks for future library service.  Maybe someone else can stack the tetris blocks in the right order for me.

1)

The other day I saw ALA Techsource tweet:

which prompted me to say:

While these spectacular central libraries are great tools of urbanization, from a service perspective they really pale in comparison to a network of differentiated service points dispersed throughout a community.  I’d really like to see an AIA/ALA award go to an architect/library system that has the vision to build/rebuild a series of branch libraries at once, recognizing that the program is not specific to a single building envelope, rather it is realized as a whole through connectivity and unique services based on localized demographics.

2)

I work in a library branch that is set back into a housing project, and occasionally we have security issues.  In fact, in my years at Brooklyn Public Library, I’ve worked in a number of branch libraries that have struggled with security issues while doing a great job providing essential library services.  For this reason, I haven’t been able to shake this ‘defensible space’ concept developed by Oscar Newman in the 1970s.  While it is a decent bandaid solution to the absolute failures of Le Corbusier style public housing projects, it is just a lousy bandaid rather than an innovative solution.

Oscar Newman “…examined residential crime patterns and the social and physical factors that correlate most strongly with crime. From this research have come architectural design concepts that foster a more proprietary attitude by residents toward their buildings and neighborhoods and enhance safety”.

He found that “A person’s claim to a territory diminishes proportionally as the number of people who share that claim with him increases.  The larger the number of people who share a territory, the less is each individual’s felt rights to it  With only a few families sharing an area, whether the interior public space of a building or the grounds of it, it is relatively for an informal understanding to be reached among the families as to what constitutes acceptable usage.”

I’m not convinced I’m down with this.  Again, I think its a decent bandaid for the modernist blunder, but today I believe that a feeling of ownership comes from work and participation in a space or project.  I do not believe that a person’s claim to a territory diminishes the more other people share that claim. That, if I read it correctly, is one of Clay Shirky’s points in Here Comes Everybody.

3)

I’ve been reading Frei Otto’s “Occupying and Connecting: Thoughts on Territories and Spheres of Influence with Particular Reference to Human Settlement“.  It is crazy genius stuff that I’m digesting in 10 page increments, but I think his grasp of nature and self-organization may hold a much better model for creating successful public spaces than Newman’s.  Newman basically writes off interior public spaces in large housing projects because if too many people have access then they won’t get that prideful feeling of ownership and the space is lost.

Otto made this experimental apparatus.  Imagine a small pool of water in any old amoeba kind of shape.  Otto takes magnetized needles with little floats on them, and puts them in the pool floating around like dollhouse fishing buoys.  The little floats will eventually come to rest in a pattern of what he calls ‘distancing occupations’.  What is fascinating is that the overall pattern that forms between the points is that of equilateral triangles.  Then, if you bisect all of the sides of the equilateral triangles (I know I’m pushing it with all this geometry, but hang in there and just look at the low-fi picture below) and connect them you get this hexagonal honeycomb.  Otto goes on to show this same principle with soap bubbles, and later in how people settle and occupy territories.  Its all a little bit like that movie Pi, only less bananas.

Anyways, there’s something in this basic self-arranging distancing occupation principle that I really think can inform the flexible public space facilities and multi-building architectural programs that we hope to make our future libraries. I’m sorry I can’t be any clearer than that, I just don’t have the answer yet.

4)

The last vignette isn’t really a vignette.  Its just a link to an article in the New York Times about the Slussen project to transform the heart of Stockholm, Sweden.  I have this sneaking suspision that everything I’m struggling to figure out in this blog post is mumbling, hung over, breakfast conversation for these urban planning competitors.  The work sounds awesome.