A note re. architecture and design: You are always somewhere
Leaving an office building today, I was thinking of how the insides of those places seem carefully designed to feel like nowhere. I don’t just mean somewhere generic; I mean a hyper-generic, unsettling kind of anti-space. I passed several people on my way from the elevator to the entrance, and it didn’t even occur to me until I was in the sunlight that what I had passed were real people.
The building was in Columbia, the affluent planned mini-city in the middle of Maryland. People complain of Columbia that it seems “too perfect.” But I don’t think the problem is that. It’s that the landscaped perfection of Columbia echoes that office building: a perfection somehow designed to erase the uniqueness of space itself, so that you feel like you are nowhere.
Which, if I may say so to the city planners, was a bad idea. Everyone wants to be somewhere, to find their bearings in the chair or building or road they find themselves in, maybe because everyone wants to belong somewhere. As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks, a place justifiably synonymous with “generic.” But there are murals on the walls and regulars who know the employees by name, elements that tell the customer, “you are somewhere.”
We paint over graffiti and assume that individual fingerprints on a place always communicate hostility or malevolent intent. But of course it doesn’t have to be that way. Good city planners offer people coordinated ways to mark public places; ways that say, “I was here, I am from here, I love this place.” Maybe this is one way to create places that communicate to people that they are somewhere, and thus somewhere where they can belong.
God bless the man who goes to work in a place whose walls say, “this is nowhere; you are not here.” He is there. So are you.
Aaaah. I like Columbia’s “carefully designed nowhere” feel. I know, I know, I must be sick, but I do. I like the feeling when you come around the corner into a long, lonely hallway in one of those offices & it feels like there is nobody in the building, it feels like nowhere. It seems like you could kinda’ hideout & read a book for a few days & not be seen. I like outdoor areas like that too. Outdoor “carefully designed nowhere” spaces on university campuses are my favorites. Do you know what I’m talking about, like the “spot behind the library and next to the student union w/ concrete benches and one tree planted in the cement where nobody goes anymore.” I like sitting in those spaces & being anonymous.