Special Report -- The "Places 25" Symposium

The “Places 25” Symposium Cassim Shepard The “Places 25” symposium, held May 3, 2008, at the U.C. Berkeley College of Environmental Design, was part anniversary celebration, part design retrospective, and part brainstorming session on directions this publication might take. Like the best birthday parties, it commingled commemoration with concern for the future in ways that were both celebra- tory and critical. Twenty-five years is a milestone that few design publications reach. Yet the purpose of the symposium was not simply to dwell on past success. The event was framed by two quota- tions from the writings of Places’ co- founder and editor, Donlyn Lyndon: “Places are spaces that you can hold in the mind, care about and make part of your life”; and “places instill the cho- reographies of society.” In opening remarks, Lyndon said he hoped the event would “test and extend these propositions.” Like the pages of the journal, he hoped it would produce “lively discussion of how valued places come into being, how they are designed, how they matter, and what we may all do to make places that nurture lives and enrich the public realm.” Designing for Place To set the stage, the symposium began with a series of reports on Places’ history and recent activities. These came from William Porter, its founding co-editor; David Moffat, its current managing editor; and Lisa Sullivan, its current publications director. The first morning panel began with a presentation by Robert Campbell, an architect and the architecture critic for the Boston Globe. Campbell based his remarks on two poems he had written about his grandparents’ house on Lake Erie, both of which struck notes of nostalgia and intellectual curiosity about place. Their proces- sional sequences of imagery, moving from inner realm to larger environ- ment, evoked an elegiac architec- ture of the imagination. Campbell’s remarks also functioned as a call for the kind of thoughtful consideration of built form and social experience that has long been a hallmark of Places. The discussion then turned to the presentation by their designers of buildings for various types of public assembly. . First, the architect Peter Bohlin described Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s designs for the Apple Store, on Fifth Avenue in New York, and for the Teton National Park Visitor Center, in Wyoming. In entirely dif- ferent contexts, the two structures explore the dynamic relationship between interior and exterior space. The work also did much to expand on Lyndon’s epigraph, “places instill the choreographies of society.” Move- ment in the Apple store is upward, from a belowground retail space to a highly visible public plaza. At the Teton Center, it is through a per- fectly proportioned courtyard, which gathers people before they enter a grand, log-supported hall where the beauty of the Tetons unfolds before them. In both cases the architecture uses transparency, concentrated mass, and carefully articulated detail to create paths. The choreography described next, by Mark Simon—Centerbrook Architects’ design for the Park East Synagogue, in Connecticut—was also one of approach. Yet, fortunately, the design did not treat the building as a precious object so much as a simple place of worship and community. His methodology of “carving program” was particularly eloquent. It resulted in a vigorously shaped wood-strand canopy that hovers over the ark and creates an altogether memorable place, echoed by analogous forms elsewhere in the building. To complete the session, Professor Elizabeth Macdonald of the University of California, Berkeley’s, Urban Places Design Group, presented her work as part of a collaborative of artists in the design for a “Circle of Memory,” con- structed of hay bales, to be installed in several museums. At each installation, the journey into and out of its central cylindrical space, where a steady fine stream of salt accumulated in a cone over time, created a ritual of movement that could be used to remember the deaths of children. The projects discussed in the second morning panel were more urban in scale—campuses, streets, and towns. The standout for me—the most stimulating project presented— was a series of design proposals by the Oakland landscape architect Walter Hood for Center Street in Berkeley. Hood’s work revealed a deep engage- ment with systems, natural and social, beyond the site in question. And the project was unique among those presented for its sensitivity to factors outside of the designer’s control. Shepard / The “Places 25” Symposium