THE UN-PUBLIC SPACE

The word “public” is usually attributed to all spaces publicly accessible. No matter its physical conditions, accessibility, freedom of activity, degree of surveillance or even its psychological value, the word “public” is used in a widespread and sometimes irritating manner.  It seems that any further specification between private and public space, any more specific cataloguing is eluded;  it would unveil certain realities that are masked behind the word “public space”.

Today, when reading Richard Sennett on the Lever House I came across with this sentence: “ the street level itself is dead space” . I started thinking in how many “public” spaces in our trip to Moscow and London where in reality “dead” spaces.  Walking along Mokhovaya Street imprisoned by cars in a deserted pathway was not a public space or at least definitely not a public experience. The concourse of the Brunswick Center, just two minutes away from our hostel in London, was equally empty. “Dead” seems a much convenient adjective than “public”. These spaces have lost any independent experiential meaning in themselves; they have become just a function of motion. They are a no man’s land; un-public space indeed.

One realizes how deep architecture and urbanism are interconnected. Richard Rogers Lloyd’s of London is coherent in concept and undoubtedly significant for the architectural discourse, but its radicalism lays on a much precious sacrifice: the killing of the public space. The cores and technical devices concentrated on the lateral façade condemn the street. The unavoidable “bad” façade is not the problem, but the residual space, the left-overs it generates. The Barbican brutalist urban development forgot the disastrous consequences on the street level that implies moving the pedestrian flow in an upper level. Back to New York, the vertiginous real-estate market of the skyscrapers resulted in private-owned –public spaces whose surveillance and even accessibility casts serious doubts about their “public” character. All these spaces (and this is just the beginning of an endless list) are usually and unfairly called “public spaces”.

Design public space in the interface between building and street is one of the most difficult issues that architects, obsessed with the building design, often forget. A cataloguing of the different kind of public spaces would help to draw the attention on which kind of public space any building really generates. Adding a suffix might be enough: dis- for spaces which are not accessible to disabled people, un- for spaces lacking of experiential meaning, over- where one’s over-visibility to others leads to isolation, etc…Under the mask of “public space” we might be surprised on how many acclaimed projects are surrounded by mis/dis/over/un-public spaces.