The Place of Research [Commentary]

EDRA / Places Awards 37encouraging, but I worry that this small but energetic group of scholars and designers alone can turn the tide from current fashions in design.I also wonder if the categories used in the awards are really that helpful, serving to further separate design from research.Perhaps the window should be opened wider to encourage the very best place-making work-be it design, planning, research or management.In the end, what is most interesting about this awards program is that they focus as much on ideas about places as the places themselves-why they are important, how they are designed and managed, and how people come to attach meaning to them.Form alone is not as important as how the form develops or evolves over time.The emphasis here is informing future action through understanding how places-both good and bad-become what they are.It is place debate and design criticism at its best.The EDRA/Places Awards is a unique and informative source of the best work being done at the intersection of design, planning and research.As the awarded projects find their way into office brochures, web pages, annual reports, and tenure packages, there are encouraging signs the program is having an impact.The real test will be if this work successfully changes the minds of educators and students, practitioners and their clients, and the public.I, for one, am hopeful of this.Notes 1.A watershed moment for research-based design was a modest request in the early 1960s from an architect designing a children's psychiatric hospital in the Bronx.Was there any research, he asked, that could make his design more fitting for children, staff and visitors?Three psychologists at the City University of New York-Leanne Rivlin, Harold Proshansky, and Bill Ittelson-eagerly responded, and eventually helped write a program to guide the architect's work.Though this project won no design awards, additional requests from architects and city agencies soon led Rivlin, Proshansky and Ittelson to establish a doctoral program in Environmental Psychology at CUNY.The first of its kind in the country, its aim was to train a group of design researchers who could work hand in hand with architects and planners to improve the quality of the built environment.2. This group meets at conferences by organizations such as the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), and many others, publishes their work in journals such as Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, Journal of the American Planning Association, Landscape Journal, and Journal of Architectural Education, and supports