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.

We can thank Oscar Newman for defensible space: the concept of influencing negative social behavior through architectural and urban design.  I only recently became aware of his fascinating and widely influential work with the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, and his book, Creating Defensible Space.  I learned of Newman when I was reading an excerpt about skateboarding in a pamphlet called Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities by Nicolas and Fabien Girardin.  Here’s the quote that got me thinking:

“An obvious target of defensible space are skateboarders.  The addition of metal plates on benches or covering city structures such as handrails has been meant to prevent skateboards form rolling on them or grinding angles. Empty spaces are also “augmented” with pointed clips so that people could not sit or lay on them, eventually targeting vagabonds and bums. Defensible space is a common feature of our cities of the 21st century, projecting new norms about what is acceptable or not down the streets.”

Maybe I’ve got too much of a heady, utopian way of looking at things, but despite the great successes of defensible space I’m wondering if its not a short-sighted and reactive design approach when creating public spaces for the 21st century.  Time and time again, when public libraries try to create good teen spaces they find that the spaces they create are rejected and that the teens would rather utilize discoverable space: they hang around in a random corner, by the drinking fountain, or wherever they feel like it.  Can architects of public spaces (and I’m talking about libraries as much as parks) borrow from the lifecycle development model developed by Braungart and McDonough in Cradle to Cradle?  Can Clay Shirky’s participatory culture argument be interpreted to include the participatory place-making as well?  Will the open-source software movement’s ideals be reflected in buildings, courtyards, and streets?  Can the future of public space be some kind of customizable, fluid, non-model?  Was Archigram right on?

As I left the Mesa Library I watched two kids with rollerblades just sitting around on one of the ramps, and I imagined that if it weren’t so cold perhaps they’d use the ramp as a picnic table or play a card game on it.  If teens stopped skating in the skatepark, I wonder what Predock would think?

btw- Thank you to the nice and helpful librarians at the Mesa Library!  Cheers!