Public Places: Collaboration, Reclaiming [PLACEMARK Award: Hugh Hardy]

Public Spaces: Partnership, Collaboration, Reclaiming The projects that follow, a sample of HHPA’s recent work, illustrate themes of collaboration and public–private partnership that are reviving and expanding the possibilities for urban public places—and which Hardy feels are central to so much of his firm’s work. Indeed, through his passionate, persistent civic involvement, as well as his work with cultural institutions and public- private partnerships, Hardy has established a model of public-spirited practice. The conventional wisdom is that our culture’s interest in public space is waning. Charles Moore’s observation nearly forty years ago that the best new American public space was Disney- land, and that you have to pay to use it, seemed prophetic to many of us at the time. But now I think that Moore was onto some- thing else: American public space is evolving, not evaporating. With this evolution has come a nec- essary diversification of the processes used to design and operate public space, and that, in turn, has revealed new opportunities for creating public space where there had been none before. Three themes—partnership, collaboration and reclaim- ing—underscore what is happening. Partnership. The notion of public-private partnership is almost a cliche these days. Yet it is fundamentally important: You can’t operate a city without public institutions, and those are in place because of individual private interests. Cities have a public realm and a private realm, and it is how these come together that defines life in the city. At the most basic level, streets are public and the buildings that front them are usu- ally private, and it is the interface between the two that makes a city work. The possibility of a private organization assuming responsibility for a park or plaza seems laudable to me. That’s why I found Bryant Park’s public space so interesting. It doesn’t just take care of itself: it is managed, programmed and paid for by a private entity. But the space is completely public, remarkable in its ability to absorb all kinds of people. It is what one hopes for in the city. Part of a citizen’s responsibility is to help take care of things. The thought that the government should do it all, even if there were enough public funds to do so, would not provide as good a result as we have now, where there are responsibilities both ways. Collaboration. Working and living in a city is a form of exchange, a form of sharing interests in which each participant contributes something to the whole. City life depends on a sense of civility, you do have to stop at red lights, after all. That is the implicit bargain in the business of people living close together. In architecture, working collaboratively helps strengthen your ideas. Design is a selective process of making choices. You start out with gen- eral questions, such as how should we organize this site, then proceed to specific ones, such as where is the front door? In a collaborative situa- tion, you’re forced to articulate what you’re trying to do, and seeing other people’s reactions helps you understand your own concerns. Some of the greatest projects in this city are the results of col- laboration. Certainly Rockefeller Center is better than any one of the individual designers who worked on it could have done by themselves. Reclaiming. One of the most fascinating oppor- tunities in the design of public space is to make PLACES 14:2