After reading the texts, the one that stood out the most in connection to the topic of my blog was Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph”.  This text goes through the main points with some self-interpretation of what Relph was saying in this text and points out where people in the past have misinterpreted the text that Relph wrote.  The way this text is written makes the reader to do his or her own interpretation of what was written.  By doing this, it made the concepts that were discussed impact me more, because I was forced in some sections to come to my conclusions about what this text was saying and also what Relph was saying in his original text.  One of the instences where is occurred was when the author starts talking about insideness and outsideness that is connected to my blog topic about physically entering interpreting a space.  “Relph suggests that the more profoundly inside a place a person feels, the stronger will be his or her identity with that place (p. 45).  This can be physical but also mental insideness a person can feel about the space.  In the physical realm a person being able to enter a building, plaza, or empty lot can bring them a deeper understanding of what the designer wanted to make you feel or what potential the empty lot has for a dynamic experience.  I was able to experience this when I went to Chicago this past week and went to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio for the first time.  I had seen pictures and read descriptions of what the experience of the space was but it was different and inspiring to be able to walk through the different rooms and see how Wright wanted the people who walked through his house to experience it.  The experience was the most powerful in the playroom and main entertaining room in the house.   In this room, I was able to experience the differing heights and how Wright wanted people to move and see each wall and what was on each wall.  I feel that the deep understanding that Wright had about his architecture can be drawn from when staring and moving through a design process.  I believe that Wright had what Relph would call “existential insideness” which is “a situation of deep, unself-conscious immersion in place and the experience most people know when they are at home in their own community and region” (p. 45).  This feeling was created inside Wrights home where he created a micro community and region that he had designed every part.  This deep immersion and sense of home is what is possible to achieve in every building that is designed but is impossible to achieve without being able to go the space and understand the community and what will deepen the sense of home.  The sense of home goes beyond residential buildings though, a commercial building where people go the work every day must also make those people feel part of a region of community.  By being able to go to Chicago this past week, I feel that my design of museum will deepen the identity of the community and buildings that surround it.

P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen. G. Vallentine. (2008). Place and Placessness, Edward Relph. Key Texts in Human Geography (43-51). London: Sage

Being There is All the Fun

Understanding a city, neighborhood, or other Urban Designs in the way that they work economically and socially can be investigated in two ways that connect to the “primary and secondary resources” (powerpoint 3).  In each way, the designer learns information about a space that can help them design the space to be used in the best way.  Primary resources such as “Built form, street structure diagram, Network of public open space, Functional mix diagram, Interview, and Experience of place have in my personal experience given me the chance to be a better designer than looking at the information in data points and demographics of people.  Exploring a place before coming the conclusion of how the city should be expanded or how a neighborhood is going to interact with another neighborhood can be most well learned by physically understanding the area.

The first time that I experienced this feeling I was not participating in a studio or architecture class, I went to Italy, France, Germany, and England with my family.  During my time in all of those countries, I felt like I learned more about the culture of how the people live in these countries in addition to investigating the monuments.  I know from reading I have done in textbooks that I would not be able to learn all the information that I learned from physically being there from the books that I have read.

Now being in a classroom and studio environment other students and I have had to do site analysis and city analysis and I have learned how hard it is to understand the site completely until we have been able to go to the site.  This can be seen in my design process because I start my design with an idea that changes almost every time after I see the site because I want the feeling and understand how people move through and around the space.  The best experience I have had with being able to go to a site was in Moscow in second year studio where the program was a restaurant. During the first day of studio, we were able to go to the site.  In addition, my precedent for the project I had also physically been to this restaurant and seen the city that the restaurant was in and helped me design my project and pushed it further than I have pushed any project since.

As I progress through this class and think about how to understand and keep using Urban Design in my future, I want to use that knowledge for site analysis and other analysis in future projects.  This is will also effect the area of architecture that I want to go into, restoring and reiterating old buildings.  By knowing how a building connects to the past and current economy, demographics, network of spaces, and public opinions I can be a better Urban Designer and Architect.  I have seen this being used on a few HGTV shows when they are restoring a building or house in a neighborhood they investigate the surrounding area before they even start doing any demolition is that was needed to know what they might want to keep.