JOURNAL
Lifestyle
Summer reading
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A garden, A lifetimeHow long people live in a house?
People staying long enough in a house had made plans to stay long enough. Many home owners built their home with the landscaping at the same time, and then sold the house years later, sometimes not long enough to contemplate the garden as an integrated part of a living, but merely as a décor. In The Gardener, Frank Cabot says "ALLEYS AND FOCAL POINTS ARE A CLASSIC GARDEN FEATURE USED OVER THE AGES IN ALL CIVILIZATIONS. AND THEY SERVE IN A SENSE TO SHUT OUT PART OF THE VIEW, SO TO CHANNEL THE VIEW TOWARDS A SPECIFIC SPOT SO YOU CAN KEEP HAVING THEM OVER AND OVER AS YOU SEE DIFFERENT VIEWS. THEY GIVE GREAT STRENGTH TO THE GARDEN." Designing a garden: Find Your ‘Vantage Points’
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We know how big we can have, How small can we live
The shuttering of community spaces around the world, in the hope of limiting the spread of COVID-19, created an oddly shared global experience of collective isolation. Across continents, people reacted to the loss of official public space by creating innovative new ways to connect through “together-yet-distant gatherings” such as neighbourhood porch parties, balcony sing-a-longs, remote film festivals or virtual zoo and museum tours. Despite these innovations, recent occurrences of “social un-distancing” in parks and other urban pockets emphasize the necessity of reactivating our community infrastructure.
Designers of public facilities have a special responsibility to create spaces that limit the very real risk of infection while supporting, encouraging, and inspiring the social connections people need. This responsibility has designers grappling with what reopening will look like and how this pandemic experience has fundamentally changed the way we shape community spaces in the future.
Recognizing the Inequities
Although we are “in this together”, the absolute shutdown of public space has had an inequitable impact on individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum. Middle-class families may lean on fast internet service, decamp to the cottage or send their children to the backyard for daily exercise. Those with fewer resources feel the lack of community resources more acutely. For some, playgrounds, community centres, and libraries are simply recreation spaces; for others they are necessities that make urban life livable, even survivable. Thus, reopening these essential pieces of social infrastructure must be a priority.
View The Self Is Not Enough, a documentary of the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montreal
Designers of public facilities have a special responsibility to create spaces that limit the very real risk of infection while supporting, encouraging, and inspiring the social connections people need. This responsibility has designers grappling with what reopening will look like and how this pandemic experience has fundamentally changed the way we shape community spaces in the future.
Recognizing the Inequities
Although we are “in this together”, the absolute shutdown of public space has had an inequitable impact on individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum. Middle-class families may lean on fast internet service, decamp to the cottage or send their children to the backyard for daily exercise. Those with fewer resources feel the lack of community resources more acutely. For some, playgrounds, community centres, and libraries are simply recreation spaces; for others they are necessities that make urban life livable, even survivable. Thus, reopening these essential pieces of social infrastructure must be a priority.
View The Self Is Not Enough, a documentary of the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montreal
View The Self Is Not Enough, a documentary of the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montreal