1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,520 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,520 --> 00:00:03,970 Commons license. 3 00:00:03,970 --> 00:00:06,360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 4 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:10,660 continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,660 --> 00:00:13,350 To make a donation or view additional materials 6 00:00:13,350 --> 00:00:17,190 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 7 00:00:17,190 --> 00:00:18,326 at ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:28,610 --> 00:00:32,210 JULIAN BEINART: OK, enough about knowledge of the past, 9 00:00:32,210 --> 00:00:36,310 be it memory or history. 10 00:00:36,310 --> 00:00:43,550 We are in a very interesting space-time capsule. 11 00:00:43,550 --> 00:00:48,470 We have the possibility of imagining the future, 12 00:00:48,470 --> 00:00:52,160 or at least contemplating more and more about how 13 00:00:52,160 --> 00:00:59,030 one might use even geometry to associate with minimizing 14 00:00:59,030 --> 00:01:02,690 the obstacles of the future. 15 00:01:02,690 --> 00:01:05,990 And we also have the capacity to look backwards, 16 00:01:05,990 --> 00:01:12,050 using many techniques, as showed in these examples. 17 00:01:12,050 --> 00:01:17,480 This should produce a much richer set of ideas of urbanism 18 00:01:17,480 --> 00:01:20,760 than modernism. 19 00:01:20,760 --> 00:01:26,570 It will depend on the genius of individual interpreters given 20 00:01:26,570 --> 00:01:29,720 this new scale of things. 21 00:01:29,720 --> 00:01:34,730 What we're not seeing are overall theories 22 00:01:34,730 --> 00:01:38,850 of urbanism based an amalgamation of these two 23 00:01:38,850 --> 00:01:39,350 ideas-- 24 00:01:42,110 --> 00:01:43,955 forward looking and backward looking. 25 00:01:46,680 --> 00:01:49,300 Maybe that'll happen. 26 00:01:49,300 --> 00:01:50,730 Maybe we're still too early. 27 00:01:53,730 --> 00:01:57,690 We switch now to a discussion of the relationship 28 00:01:57,690 --> 00:01:59,625 between public and private space. 29 00:02:05,450 --> 00:02:09,860 At first glance, the distinction between private and public 30 00:02:09,860 --> 00:02:14,630 space is simply a question of the difference 31 00:02:14,630 --> 00:02:18,140 between rights and obligations. 32 00:02:18,140 --> 00:02:22,460 You cannot park your car on my land, 33 00:02:22,460 --> 00:02:26,000 because I have the right of ownership. 34 00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:30,440 But when we get to a parking lot on Mass Avenue, 35 00:02:30,440 --> 00:02:36,560 it's a contestation between two of us fighting for public use, 36 00:02:36,560 --> 00:02:38,300 for the use of a public-- 37 00:02:38,300 --> 00:02:42,050 the available space at any time. 38 00:02:42,050 --> 00:02:44,930 Sometimes we are very angry that we 39 00:02:44,930 --> 00:02:49,070 are beaten by a car which has gotten there first, 40 00:02:49,070 --> 00:02:51,020 but we have no rights. 41 00:02:51,020 --> 00:02:53,480 We only have rights to part if it's free. 42 00:02:58,530 --> 00:03:02,640 In the same way, we have rights of behavior 43 00:03:02,640 --> 00:03:15,840 in our private world which are not superintended by the law, 44 00:03:15,840 --> 00:03:20,790 provided we don't hurt anybody or behave illegally. 45 00:03:23,400 --> 00:03:28,030 But if I grow marijuana in my garden, 46 00:03:28,030 --> 00:03:33,672 and as long as it's seen as green space, it's OK. 47 00:03:33,672 --> 00:03:37,680 There are no rules in the Cambridge Historical Society's 48 00:03:37,680 --> 00:03:41,850 book which says that you're not allowed to grow marijuana 49 00:03:41,850 --> 00:03:43,920 in your garden. 50 00:03:43,920 --> 00:03:48,930 There probably are other rules which prohibit that. 51 00:03:51,990 --> 00:03:53,670 There are a number of other distinctions 52 00:03:53,670 --> 00:03:57,030 between public and private and have 53 00:03:57,030 --> 00:03:58,630 been used at different times. 54 00:03:58,630 --> 00:04:00,360 I don't want to go into them. 55 00:04:00,360 --> 00:04:04,770 I simply want to look with you at a number of examples 56 00:04:04,770 --> 00:04:08,490 where the relationship between public and private 57 00:04:08,490 --> 00:04:18,410 is not so clear and where, if you take a matrix 58 00:04:18,410 --> 00:04:24,280 and have four headings to your vertical columns, 59 00:04:24,280 --> 00:04:28,895 the four headings are use, ownership, access, and meaning. 60 00:04:31,850 --> 00:04:34,270 Let's look at each of these categories 61 00:04:34,270 --> 00:04:37,850 and see what examples come to mind. 62 00:04:37,850 --> 00:04:40,450 Under the first, which is use-- 63 00:04:40,450 --> 00:04:43,585 use, ownership, access, and meaning-- 64 00:04:48,890 --> 00:04:54,590 Richard Sennett gives an example, in London, 65 00:04:54,590 --> 00:04:55,820 in the 18th century. 66 00:05:00,410 --> 00:05:07,640 It was impossible for investors in shipping and in trade 67 00:05:07,640 --> 00:05:13,100 to know the outcome of of a shipping trip 68 00:05:13,100 --> 00:05:16,100 that they've invested in. 69 00:05:16,100 --> 00:05:18,570 There was no electronic communication. 70 00:05:18,570 --> 00:05:20,480 It took too long to write letters. 71 00:05:20,480 --> 00:05:24,470 The letters had to come by ship, anyway. 72 00:05:24,470 --> 00:05:26,360 So you didn't know if the pirates had 73 00:05:26,360 --> 00:05:32,270 got hold of the ship that was carrying silver back to Spain 74 00:05:32,270 --> 00:05:39,020 or whether the ship had been sunk in a hurricane. 75 00:05:39,020 --> 00:05:41,570 This knowledge was certainly capable 76 00:05:41,570 --> 00:05:45,185 of being transmitted verbally through human beings. 77 00:05:48,190 --> 00:05:54,670 So near the docks in London, a coffee bar grew up. 78 00:05:54,670 --> 00:05:59,680 The coffee bar was a private entity. 79 00:05:59,680 --> 00:06:05,150 You paid a penny to enter and sit down. 80 00:06:05,150 --> 00:06:07,060 You weren't able to-- 81 00:06:07,060 --> 00:06:11,080 you had to sit anywhere that space was available. 82 00:06:11,080 --> 00:06:12,370 You couldn't reserve space. 83 00:06:15,000 --> 00:06:22,170 It was frequented by sailors who had this important information 84 00:06:22,170 --> 00:06:25,170 about their ships. 85 00:06:25,170 --> 00:06:27,540 So the wealthy and the poor managed 86 00:06:27,540 --> 00:06:31,890 to occupy the same space because of the importance 87 00:06:31,890 --> 00:06:32,910 of the information. 88 00:06:37,440 --> 00:06:38,865 What became of this place? 89 00:06:47,260 --> 00:06:53,050 Lloyd's of London grew out of this corner coffee shop. 90 00:06:53,050 --> 00:06:56,050 The important thing is that an important public set 91 00:06:56,050 --> 00:06:58,810 of transactions could take place, 92 00:06:58,810 --> 00:07:02,350 but under the shelter of a private institution. 93 00:07:11,710 --> 00:07:16,410 If we wish to put our body into public space, we need security. 94 00:07:19,010 --> 00:07:23,630 Security is often provided more by private institutions 95 00:07:23,630 --> 00:07:24,640 than by public. 96 00:07:27,900 --> 00:07:30,660 30,000 people on a summer's night 97 00:07:30,660 --> 00:07:36,750 occupy the center of Boston only if they go to the Red Sox game. 98 00:07:36,750 --> 00:07:40,560 The Red Sox are a private corporation 99 00:07:40,560 --> 00:07:43,440 with private security. 100 00:07:43,440 --> 00:07:47,940 MIT has its own security force. 101 00:07:47,940 --> 00:07:50,310 Harvard has its-- and the Christian Science Center-- 102 00:07:50,310 --> 00:07:56,835 just going down Mass Avenue, you would transect a number 103 00:07:56,835 --> 00:07:59,640 of private authorities. 104 00:07:59,640 --> 00:08:06,030 So there's a principle that the private sector provides 105 00:08:06,030 --> 00:08:12,810 a kind of phenomenological and actual security for the actions 106 00:08:12,810 --> 00:08:21,040 of public need, such as putting your body into public space. 107 00:08:21,040 --> 00:08:23,680 For those people who have criticized-- 108 00:08:23,680 --> 00:08:25,000 and they're endless. 109 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:28,720 Hannah Arendt, for instance, Richard Sennett 110 00:08:28,720 --> 00:08:35,710 criticized the modern world as promoting isolation 111 00:08:35,710 --> 00:08:38,770 from the public world-- 112 00:08:38,770 --> 00:08:43,750 narcissism, self-preoccupation, people locked up 113 00:08:43,750 --> 00:08:48,010 in their own private quarters, fed 114 00:08:48,010 --> 00:08:51,910 by television and electronic systems 115 00:08:51,910 --> 00:08:58,870 and not hazarding the danger, if you want to call it, 116 00:08:58,870 --> 00:09:02,530 but the adventure, which is a better word, 117 00:09:02,530 --> 00:09:06,020 of immersing yourself into public space. 118 00:09:06,020 --> 00:09:11,530 So public space doesn't exist, except in Roger Scruton, 119 00:09:11,530 --> 00:09:15,400 the British critic's, argument that public space only 120 00:09:15,400 --> 00:09:18,190 exists in the street. 121 00:09:18,190 --> 00:09:24,750 All the rest is an affectation and an unnecessary affectation. 122 00:09:24,750 --> 00:09:31,870 The idea of creating a public space as a Plaza 123 00:09:31,870 --> 00:09:35,640 is an affectation. 124 00:09:35,640 --> 00:09:41,170 It's true of contemporary Tokyo, for instance. 125 00:09:44,190 --> 00:09:48,930 Public world exists in the dense stream of connections 126 00:09:48,930 --> 00:09:50,280 between functions. 127 00:09:53,560 --> 00:10:01,250 There's no tradition of public meeting space. 128 00:10:01,250 --> 00:10:07,370 Where it's been tried in front of the tall, new metropolitan 129 00:10:07,370 --> 00:10:10,730 city hall building, it's a waste of time. 130 00:10:15,840 --> 00:10:19,370 We'll go into the history of public space in a few minutes. 131 00:10:22,860 --> 00:10:23,870 We still have time. 132 00:10:28,050 --> 00:10:41,230 So if we see that public use can be 133 00:10:41,230 --> 00:10:48,530 made more appropriate by private endeavor, 134 00:10:48,530 --> 00:10:54,270 we have a notion of sharing of use 135 00:10:54,270 --> 00:11:03,405 which has always been true in urbanism. 136 00:11:08,520 --> 00:11:14,820 The agora, which most of our arguments for public 137 00:11:14,820 --> 00:11:24,890 communication space rests on, was a 37-acre piece of messy 138 00:11:24,890 --> 00:11:30,890 mixtures of monuments, temples, shoemakers, 139 00:11:30,890 --> 00:11:36,560 stoas where philosophers like Socrates sat and engaged young 140 00:11:36,560 --> 00:11:37,820 men-- 141 00:11:37,820 --> 00:11:40,670 not young women, young men-- 142 00:11:40,670 --> 00:11:46,545 in discourse, even housing. 143 00:11:50,460 --> 00:11:52,550 This is the space of democracy. 144 00:11:59,190 --> 00:12:05,700 Wycherley, the historian, writes about it in the same way 145 00:12:05,700 --> 00:12:12,750 that I've just mentioned it as a highly dense agglomeration 146 00:12:12,750 --> 00:12:17,280 of shoemakers, temples, monuments, none of which 147 00:12:17,280 --> 00:12:19,140 fit any cardinal pattern. 148 00:12:23,050 --> 00:12:32,200 There is no assemblage of items in the buildings, which 149 00:12:32,200 --> 00:12:34,210 sit in relation to any other. 150 00:12:42,820 --> 00:12:49,330 This is, in one thesis done here by a [? Marxist ?] [? smart ?] 151 00:12:49,330 --> 00:12:56,180 student, the result of a kind of democratic form of rhetoric 152 00:12:56,180 --> 00:12:58,420 which only allowed people to speak-- 153 00:12:58,420 --> 00:13:02,860 that's males and not women and not slave-- 154 00:13:02,860 --> 00:13:06,970 to take part in discourse through the use 155 00:13:06,970 --> 00:13:08,285 of a particular language. 156 00:13:16,550 --> 00:13:21,860 When it became necessary for people to meet and debate 157 00:13:21,860 --> 00:13:28,190 propositions later on, a meeting place 158 00:13:28,190 --> 00:13:34,280 called the Pnyx was created separate from the agora. 159 00:13:34,280 --> 00:13:36,620 The agora was this mixed domain. 160 00:13:40,790 --> 00:13:46,580 Aristotle rejected that image of the agora. 161 00:13:46,580 --> 00:13:51,470 For him, a public plane or public place of meeting 162 00:13:51,470 --> 00:13:58,700 was a clean, absolutely minimized environment. 163 00:13:58,700 --> 00:14:02,883 I should read you the quotation from him. 164 00:14:16,210 --> 00:14:23,895 Here-- "The agora in Athens, far from being architecturally 165 00:14:23,895 --> 00:14:27,840 impressive, was a jumble of crowded downtown streets 166 00:14:27,840 --> 00:14:29,910 and the regular open spaces where 167 00:14:29,910 --> 00:14:32,865 shrines and altars, public buildings and monuments, 168 00:14:32,865 --> 00:14:39,132 stood in the midst of workshops, market stalls, and taverns. 169 00:14:39,132 --> 00:14:42,540 The agora was the haunt of the dregs of the populace. 170 00:14:42,540 --> 00:14:47,280 The home of idleness, vulgarity, and gossip. 171 00:14:47,280 --> 00:14:51,600 For Aristotle, the ideal public square 172 00:14:51,600 --> 00:14:54,780 were that all commercial activities and all merchants 173 00:14:54,780 --> 00:15:00,510 and vendors would be exported to another part of the town. 174 00:15:00,510 --> 00:15:03,420 Nothing in the agora may be bought or sold. 175 00:15:03,420 --> 00:15:05,490 No member of the lower order may be 176 00:15:05,490 --> 00:15:08,880 admitted unless summoned by the" and so on and so on. 177 00:15:13,090 --> 00:15:17,220 So much of Aristotle's view of the public meeting space, 178 00:15:17,220 --> 00:15:20,610 as opposed to the agora, the Athenian agora, 179 00:15:20,610 --> 00:15:23,235 has become part of architectural dogma. 180 00:15:26,210 --> 00:15:33,140 City Hall Plaza rests on an Aristotelian assumption 181 00:15:33,140 --> 00:15:40,190 that there is something absolute about prior public space 182 00:15:40,190 --> 00:15:46,990 which is satisfied by whenever we wish to immerse ourselves 183 00:15:46,990 --> 00:15:48,590 in bedlam. 184 00:15:48,590 --> 00:15:52,460 In a metaphysical condition, we think of it 185 00:15:52,460 --> 00:15:57,380 as depicting our public environment 186 00:15:57,380 --> 00:16:00,620 in gracious and hallowed terms. 187 00:16:00,620 --> 00:16:02,570 The curious thing is the pattern, 188 00:16:02,570 --> 00:16:07,280 the bipolar relationship between City Hall Plaza 189 00:16:07,280 --> 00:16:10,130 and Faneuil Hall Marketplace. 190 00:16:10,130 --> 00:16:12,290 Faneuil Hall Marketplace would be 191 00:16:12,290 --> 00:16:17,040 the agora in the ideal connection between the two. 192 00:16:17,040 --> 00:16:19,550 However, it's not. 193 00:16:19,550 --> 00:16:24,500 It's a singular high, upmarket phenomenon 194 00:16:24,500 --> 00:16:27,500 totally driven by market conditions, 195 00:16:27,500 --> 00:16:29,020 at market conditions. 196 00:16:35,610 --> 00:16:46,620 So we start off with a notion of the public meeting place, which 197 00:16:46,620 --> 00:16:53,430 derives from a unique setting for democracy 198 00:16:53,430 --> 00:16:58,530 in first century Athens and has maintained itself 199 00:16:58,530 --> 00:17:01,215 through deviations under the Romans. 200 00:17:04,190 --> 00:17:08,690 There were no elevated platforms in the agora 201 00:17:08,690 --> 00:17:10,730 for people to make speeches. 202 00:17:10,730 --> 00:17:15,520 If you spoke, you spoke from the same plane as everybody else. 203 00:17:15,520 --> 00:17:19,190 The Romans introduced in the Forum places 204 00:17:19,190 --> 00:17:23,869 for people who were spokesmen, people 205 00:17:23,869 --> 00:17:29,240 who had particular ability to make political speeches 206 00:17:29,240 --> 00:17:33,230 or speeches which are non-political 207 00:17:33,230 --> 00:17:35,675 but of specialized nature. 208 00:17:39,020 --> 00:17:41,510 In the examples I show in the slides 209 00:17:41,510 --> 00:17:44,630 at the beginning of next class, you 210 00:17:44,630 --> 00:17:47,570 will see that the traditional-- 211 00:17:47,570 --> 00:17:54,260 many of the traditional public squares in small towns in Italy 212 00:17:54,260 --> 00:18:00,650 were simply based upon passageways through space, not 213 00:18:00,650 --> 00:18:04,280 cul-de-sacs of space at all. 214 00:18:04,280 --> 00:18:12,230 I spent a year in Assisi, living in Assisi, documenting the town 215 00:18:12,230 --> 00:18:15,670 and measuring pedestrian volumes. 216 00:18:15,670 --> 00:18:20,180 The Piazza del Comune is exactly that space. 217 00:18:20,180 --> 00:18:22,310 I'll show you in some illustrations. 218 00:18:27,510 --> 00:18:31,290 In the post-telephone era, the need 219 00:18:31,290 --> 00:18:35,970 for people to obtain communication 220 00:18:35,970 --> 00:18:40,290 by machine-interposed systems has become another variable. 221 00:18:45,080 --> 00:18:54,900 What is the most significant public place built since 1920? 222 00:18:54,900 --> 00:18:55,530 Anywhere? 223 00:19:01,270 --> 00:19:04,210 This is part of an urban tradition, after all. 224 00:19:04,210 --> 00:19:05,669 If we stopped-- 225 00:19:05,669 --> 00:19:07,545 AUDIENCE: But it's really hard to [INAUDIBLE] 226 00:19:07,545 --> 00:19:08,014 JULIAN BEINART: Hm? 227 00:19:08,014 --> 00:19:10,190 AUDIENCE: It's really hard to say one [INAUDIBLE] 228 00:19:10,190 --> 00:19:11,440 JULIAN BEINART: Well, say six. 229 00:19:11,440 --> 00:19:15,808 [LAUGHTER] 230 00:19:15,808 --> 00:19:16,808 AUDIENCE: The High Line? 231 00:19:16,808 --> 00:19:18,030 [LAUGHS] 232 00:19:18,030 --> 00:19:23,536 JULIAN BEINART: High Line is an old train track. 233 00:19:23,536 --> 00:19:26,353 AUDIENCE: Oh, do you mean from [INAUDIBLE]?? 234 00:19:26,353 --> 00:19:27,520 JULIAN BEINART: No, I don't. 235 00:19:27,520 --> 00:19:31,510 I mean just anything which resembles a public square. 236 00:19:34,760 --> 00:19:37,400 AUDIENCE: They built one in Columbia Heights in DC 237 00:19:37,400 --> 00:19:41,940 in the early 2000s that's been pretty successful. 238 00:19:41,940 --> 00:19:42,815 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah. 239 00:19:42,815 --> 00:19:43,790 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 240 00:19:43,790 --> 00:19:45,207 JULIAN BEINART: Rockefeller Center 241 00:19:45,207 --> 00:19:48,830 is by far the best, universally. 242 00:19:48,830 --> 00:19:51,920 It contradicts all the argument about public. 243 00:19:51,920 --> 00:19:54,290 It's the largest private investment 244 00:19:54,290 --> 00:19:56,090 in a city in history. 245 00:19:59,120 --> 00:20:00,520 Let me give you a few details. 246 00:20:15,120 --> 00:20:17,700 It's the largest privately held complex 247 00:20:17,700 --> 00:20:21,180 of its kind in the world. 248 00:20:21,180 --> 00:20:23,810 It's the largest private building project ever 249 00:20:23,810 --> 00:20:25,365 undertaken in modern times. 250 00:20:27,980 --> 00:20:30,830 It was bought-- it was leased by John D. 251 00:20:30,830 --> 00:20:38,640 Rockefeller from Columbia University in 1928. 252 00:20:38,640 --> 00:20:44,190 It was completed-- it was built between 1930 and 1939. 253 00:20:44,190 --> 00:20:48,270 In 1985, Columbia University sold the land 254 00:20:48,270 --> 00:20:51,540 beneath Rockefeller Center to the Rockefeller Group 255 00:20:51,540 --> 00:20:54,985 for $400 million. 256 00:20:54,985 --> 00:21:02,250 The entire complex was purchased by Mitsubishi Estate in 1989. 257 00:21:02,250 --> 00:21:07,590 In 2000, the current owner [INAUDIBLE] paid $1.85 billion 258 00:21:07,590 --> 00:21:09,990 for all the buildings. 259 00:21:13,230 --> 00:21:15,990 This is an-- there could be nothing more 260 00:21:15,990 --> 00:21:20,550 private in ownership than Rockefeller Center. 261 00:21:24,120 --> 00:21:29,320 It provided the public with an open space. 262 00:21:29,320 --> 00:21:32,610 It provided the public with an underground concourse, 263 00:21:32,610 --> 00:21:34,110 shopping concourse. 264 00:21:34,110 --> 00:21:37,410 It added streets to the number of streets 265 00:21:37,410 --> 00:21:39,840 in the grid in Manhattan. 266 00:21:39,840 --> 00:21:41,625 And yet it's a public space. 267 00:21:45,170 --> 00:21:50,770 So does public space have to be owned by the public? 268 00:21:54,810 --> 00:21:58,860 I'm looking for examples of contradictions 269 00:21:58,860 --> 00:22:02,940 simply to make the argument a little more interesting. 270 00:22:02,940 --> 00:22:05,910 AUDIENCE: Well, there's the famous court case, a Supreme 271 00:22:05,910 --> 00:22:08,860 Court case, in the suburban mall in Portland, Oregon. 272 00:22:08,860 --> 00:22:11,365 I forgot the details, but that's where, 273 00:22:11,365 --> 00:22:13,740 I think, you're not allowed to have a protest in the mall 274 00:22:13,740 --> 00:22:17,613 even though it functions as a public space, 275 00:22:17,613 --> 00:22:18,880 because it's private. 276 00:22:18,880 --> 00:22:20,910 So even Rockefeller has more control 277 00:22:20,910 --> 00:22:26,640 over that space than a space that actually would be common. 278 00:22:26,640 --> 00:22:28,890 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, I don't know about-- 279 00:22:28,890 --> 00:22:31,770 certainly, Diego Rivera's mural-- 280 00:22:31,770 --> 00:22:33,150 AUDIENCE: [? Mural ?] [INAUDIBLE] 281 00:22:33,150 --> 00:22:34,400 JULIAN BEINART: --was removed. 282 00:22:36,870 --> 00:22:42,900 And doing this just before the '39 war. 283 00:22:42,900 --> 00:22:46,560 Germany wanted to invest in Rockefeller Center 284 00:22:46,560 --> 00:22:49,290 and build something called Deutsches Haus. 285 00:22:49,290 --> 00:22:52,770 And that was turned down. 286 00:22:52,770 --> 00:22:57,750 So the Rockefellers have played a very antiseptic attitude 287 00:22:57,750 --> 00:22:59,760 towards politics. 288 00:22:59,760 --> 00:23:05,280 I don't know what the present status would be. 289 00:23:05,280 --> 00:23:07,750 Security issues at the moment in America 290 00:23:07,750 --> 00:23:12,210 are probably so inflamed after Boston 291 00:23:12,210 --> 00:23:16,020 that you would probably stop anybody carrying 292 00:23:16,020 --> 00:23:19,140 a knapsack for a while. 293 00:23:19,140 --> 00:23:23,640 But to be more serious, I don't know about the limitations 294 00:23:23,640 --> 00:23:27,600 on public protest in New York. 295 00:23:27,600 --> 00:23:29,010 I should ask somebody. 296 00:23:31,740 --> 00:23:35,070 I don't know of any history of the restriction 297 00:23:35,070 --> 00:23:38,310 of public protest in New York. 298 00:23:38,310 --> 00:23:41,460 It's a very open city. 299 00:23:41,460 --> 00:23:43,980 AUDIENCE: Well, with the protests, 300 00:23:43,980 --> 00:23:46,644 they started penning people in [INAUDIBLE] [? Iraq. ?] 301 00:23:46,644 --> 00:23:48,403 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] public [INAUDIBLE] 302 00:23:48,403 --> 00:23:49,820 AUDIENCE: Yeah, and that one, too. 303 00:23:49,820 --> 00:23:50,320 They would-- 304 00:23:50,320 --> 00:23:51,200 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 305 00:23:51,200 --> 00:23:52,575 AUDIENCE: There was that famous-- 306 00:23:52,575 --> 00:23:55,880 the day before we invaded Iraq the second time, 307 00:23:55,880 --> 00:23:58,172 there were protests in cities all around the world. 308 00:23:58,172 --> 00:23:59,630 And you saw most [INAUDIBLE] people 309 00:23:59,630 --> 00:24:00,740 were gathering in plazas. 310 00:24:00,740 --> 00:24:02,930 And in New York, they had you penned in. 311 00:24:02,930 --> 00:24:08,044 They had all the streets blocked off with the pop-up fences. 312 00:24:08,044 --> 00:24:09,550 It didn't look very open. 313 00:24:12,770 --> 00:24:18,080 JULIAN BEINART: It raises another question, 314 00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:21,340 which urbanistically, is difficult to answer. 315 00:24:25,490 --> 00:24:31,250 We have City Hall sitting on a plaza. 316 00:24:31,250 --> 00:24:34,220 The mayor has said that he was actually thought 317 00:24:34,220 --> 00:24:37,610 of selling City Hall Plaza-- 318 00:24:37,610 --> 00:24:38,740 City Hall. 319 00:24:38,740 --> 00:24:42,180 I don't know about the Plaza. 320 00:24:42,180 --> 00:24:44,790 Do you feel more public when putting your body 321 00:24:44,790 --> 00:24:54,345 into space in Filene's Basement than you do in City Hall Plaza? 322 00:24:59,020 --> 00:25:03,670 If association with other people is the phenomenon which 323 00:25:03,670 --> 00:25:08,650 guides us from a self-preoccupation 324 00:25:08,650 --> 00:25:15,400 to a sense of being part of a large human race, 325 00:25:15,400 --> 00:25:18,910 part of the rhetoric of communication, 326 00:25:18,910 --> 00:25:23,330 stochastics, and so on, which Hannah Arendt 327 00:25:23,330 --> 00:25:27,560 makes a big fuss of in her book, The Human Condition, 328 00:25:27,560 --> 00:25:29,075 that we are different from animals. 329 00:25:33,360 --> 00:25:36,450 I don't go to, nor do I know anybody 330 00:25:36,450 --> 00:25:40,680 who goes to, Boston City Hall Plaza on a Sunday morning 331 00:25:40,680 --> 00:25:42,680 to negotiate with strangers. 332 00:25:47,660 --> 00:25:52,090 AUDIENCE: [? You need ?] [? to go ?] [INAUDIBLE] 333 00:25:52,090 --> 00:25:53,090 JULIAN BEINART: You do-- 334 00:25:53,090 --> 00:25:53,965 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 335 00:25:53,965 --> 00:25:56,428 JULIAN BEINART: --because you have too little else. 336 00:25:56,428 --> 00:25:58,850 AUDIENCE: But [? you might ?] [INAUDIBLE] 337 00:25:58,850 --> 00:26:01,000 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, I know-- 338 00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:03,410 fair enough. 339 00:26:03,410 --> 00:26:07,430 In Assisi, you would wander down to the Piazza del Comune 340 00:26:07,430 --> 00:26:12,020 because it's on your path somewhere else anyway. 341 00:26:12,020 --> 00:26:15,950 It's in the middle of a small town. 342 00:26:15,950 --> 00:26:18,660 And if there's any action-- 343 00:26:18,660 --> 00:26:21,500 secondary, the amount of private accommodation you've got 344 00:26:21,500 --> 00:26:23,890 is very small. 345 00:26:23,890 --> 00:26:27,260 Why do black kids in Baltimore play basketball in the street? 346 00:26:30,100 --> 00:26:32,020 Because they haven't got the space and got 347 00:26:32,020 --> 00:26:35,050 backyards to play basketball as you can 348 00:26:35,050 --> 00:26:36,660 in your own suburban garden. 349 00:26:39,210 --> 00:26:41,610 So all these connections-- 350 00:26:41,610 --> 00:26:45,420 City Hall Plaza should have been surrounded by dense housing. 351 00:26:50,190 --> 00:26:57,870 Most of the Rockefeller Center placed in Des Moines, Iowa, 352 00:26:57,870 --> 00:27:01,200 would not be the same as Rockefeller Center built 353 00:27:01,200 --> 00:27:07,800 on a grid of density plus income with Fifth Avenue 354 00:27:07,800 --> 00:27:14,430 right adjacent to it and part of an extraordinary grid 355 00:27:14,430 --> 00:27:18,750 which pumps energy through all of the system, 356 00:27:18,750 --> 00:27:24,590 much like the system of reticulation in your brain. 357 00:27:28,370 --> 00:27:30,080 Let's just look at some other examples. 358 00:27:42,660 --> 00:27:48,400 Under the idea of control or access, 359 00:27:48,400 --> 00:27:54,100 I pay taxes to maintain army camps and nuclear power 360 00:27:54,100 --> 00:28:02,250 stations and private domains which I don't claim access to. 361 00:28:02,250 --> 00:28:05,940 But yet I own a fraction of it. 362 00:28:05,940 --> 00:28:12,440 What is public about me earning part of the built environment 363 00:28:12,440 --> 00:28:17,220 but not being able to have access to it? 364 00:28:17,220 --> 00:28:32,200 I have much more access to shopping environments, which 365 00:28:32,200 --> 00:28:36,235 are largely private than I do to-- 366 00:28:42,390 --> 00:28:50,200 who guarantees access to all space, independent 367 00:28:50,200 --> 00:28:51,010 of ownership? 368 00:28:58,040 --> 00:29:04,190 This isn't a subject which Michael Sorkin tries 369 00:29:04,190 --> 00:29:11,150 to attack in his book, where he terms shopping 370 00:29:11,150 --> 00:29:19,620 centers space be ageographic, where 371 00:29:19,620 --> 00:29:23,310 there's dissipation of stable relationships, 372 00:29:23,310 --> 00:29:27,480 of loosening of ties to any specific place that 373 00:29:27,480 --> 00:29:31,200 is nothing which is emanating from history. 374 00:29:31,200 --> 00:29:32,190 Everything is ersatz. 375 00:29:36,850 --> 00:29:40,550 The market doesn't produce any environment 376 00:29:40,550 --> 00:29:45,500 which has the resonance that is required 377 00:29:45,500 --> 00:29:49,265 for domain of public space. 378 00:29:52,490 --> 00:29:55,220 And lastly, the category of meaning-- 379 00:29:59,990 --> 00:30:03,230 but just before we leave ownership 380 00:30:03,230 --> 00:30:06,720 is the category of psychological ownership, 381 00:30:06,720 --> 00:30:11,825 which is very much part of the habitation of urbanism. 382 00:30:16,580 --> 00:30:21,470 If I had to ask you, in Boston, what 383 00:30:21,470 --> 00:30:27,770 would we miss more, the Boston Celtics moving to Sacramento 384 00:30:27,770 --> 00:30:31,490 or City Hall Plaza being redeveloped? 385 00:30:34,590 --> 00:30:40,890 The one is an absolutely public phenomenon, especially. 386 00:30:40,890 --> 00:30:43,500 The Celtics are a private company. 387 00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:52,400 They're only physically in the sense they play 62-- 388 00:30:52,400 --> 00:30:56,810 31 games a year in the town. 389 00:30:56,810 --> 00:31:02,090 But the psychological ownership, which is a very-- 390 00:31:02,090 --> 00:31:03,890 again, we go back to [INAUDIBLE]---- 391 00:31:03,890 --> 00:31:06,350 or not back to him, necessarily. 392 00:31:06,350 --> 00:31:10,220 But we get this sense that there are 393 00:31:10,220 --> 00:31:13,790 traces of understanding which we carry 394 00:31:13,790 --> 00:31:19,220 with us as human beings which are not absolutely contingent. 395 00:31:21,810 --> 00:31:23,038 It's five to two. 396 00:31:28,410 --> 00:31:30,675 Let's just talk a little bit about meaning. 397 00:31:33,890 --> 00:31:38,390 The federal courthouse in Boston is an interesting example. 398 00:31:38,390 --> 00:31:42,740 It faces towards the sea, which is 399 00:31:42,740 --> 00:31:49,700 a foolish kind of notion, facing to lobstermen in the boats. 400 00:31:49,700 --> 00:31:53,210 The traditional courthouse in New England 401 00:31:53,210 --> 00:31:56,150 faces towards the town, to a square, 402 00:31:56,150 --> 00:31:58,497 opposite a church, or something of this kind. 403 00:31:58,497 --> 00:32:00,997 AUDIENCE: It's really weird, because the courthouse here not 404 00:32:00,997 --> 00:32:06,750 only faces the sea, but that's really good prime real estate 405 00:32:06,750 --> 00:32:08,340 that is off-limits. 406 00:32:08,340 --> 00:32:10,567 So it's heavily secured [INAUDIBLE] 407 00:32:10,567 --> 00:32:12,900 JULIAN BEINART: Well, it has a McDonald's underneath it. 408 00:32:12,900 --> 00:32:14,970 AUDIENCE: Well, yeah, but underneath it. 409 00:32:14,970 --> 00:32:17,080 JULIAN BEINART: Well, as part of it. 410 00:32:17,080 --> 00:32:19,610 AUDIENCE: So it's weird to stand in that little corner, 411 00:32:19,610 --> 00:32:22,960 that little tip, and look at what they have 412 00:32:22,960 --> 00:32:25,440 and then, at the same time, see nobody moving around 413 00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:29,740 because of the security around, surrounding the place. 414 00:32:29,740 --> 00:32:32,290 JULIAN BEINART: It's badly configured in a number of ways. 415 00:32:32,290 --> 00:32:38,650 But they are private courthouses in New England, in Boston. 416 00:32:38,650 --> 00:32:40,580 In the State Street building, there 417 00:32:40,580 --> 00:32:45,400 are courthouses which are purely private, 418 00:32:45,400 --> 00:32:51,550 where you can settle civil suits by judges who are retired, 419 00:32:51,550 --> 00:32:52,810 sitting in. 420 00:32:52,810 --> 00:32:55,180 And you have to agree that you will-- 421 00:32:55,180 --> 00:32:59,080 now, what is the difference between a public courthouse 422 00:32:59,080 --> 00:33:03,760 and a private courthouse in contemporary [INAUDIBLE]?? 423 00:33:03,760 --> 00:33:09,070 The private courthouse is lost in the assemblage of the State 424 00:33:09,070 --> 00:33:10,837 Street tall building. 425 00:33:10,837 --> 00:33:12,670 You could be going to visit your accountant, 426 00:33:12,670 --> 00:33:17,380 instead of which you go to a courthouse, which is not-- 427 00:33:17,380 --> 00:33:19,360 all you have to agree is to listen, 428 00:33:19,360 --> 00:33:21,760 to take the judgment of-- 429 00:33:21,760 --> 00:33:25,030 you have the wonderfully beautiful environment. 430 00:33:25,030 --> 00:33:28,060 It doesn't have the dregs of the population have 431 00:33:28,060 --> 00:33:29,830 to go to a public courthouse. 432 00:33:33,120 --> 00:33:36,690 I wonder how that would configure in the [INAUDIBLE] 433 00:33:36,690 --> 00:33:37,835 structure of a town. 434 00:33:44,940 --> 00:33:51,120 OK, I've used the shorthand system 435 00:33:51,120 --> 00:33:55,320 of trying to connect us to some of the dilemmas 436 00:33:55,320 --> 00:33:57,210 of public and private life. 437 00:34:12,210 --> 00:34:19,850 The idea of solitude, removal from the public, 438 00:34:19,850 --> 00:34:25,130 was considered madness in medieval society. 439 00:34:33,329 --> 00:34:40,489 You were considered insane or heroic if you went on a trip 440 00:34:40,489 --> 00:34:46,489 without somebody else, without a group of people. 441 00:34:46,489 --> 00:34:49,739 To build or to maintain your own private garden 442 00:34:49,739 --> 00:34:55,100 was considered a very antisocial move. 443 00:34:58,940 --> 00:35:05,540 What caused us, as a society, to change 444 00:35:05,540 --> 00:35:09,530 from an extreme publicness? 445 00:35:09,530 --> 00:35:13,610 And you read this book on Socrates in Athens. 446 00:35:13,610 --> 00:35:17,390 You were amazed at the sense of transparency. 447 00:35:19,950 --> 00:35:24,370 Socrates would be walking barefoot through the agora, 448 00:35:24,370 --> 00:35:27,840 and a young man would come up to him and ask him something. 449 00:35:27,840 --> 00:35:31,290 And he'd give a philosophical answer. 450 00:35:31,290 --> 00:35:33,360 And the young man would be asking 451 00:35:33,360 --> 00:35:37,680 for where he could buy food. 452 00:35:37,680 --> 00:35:40,350 This intermersing of the acceptance 453 00:35:40,350 --> 00:35:47,160 of remote speculation about life and everyday things 454 00:35:47,160 --> 00:35:51,780 is not part of our domain any longer. 455 00:35:51,780 --> 00:35:54,200 It may be in some places. 456 00:35:57,260 --> 00:35:59,360 Why did we invent solitude? 457 00:36:09,755 --> 00:36:11,610 Let's start with that place. 458 00:36:11,610 --> 00:36:13,500 Think about the answer to that question. 459 00:36:18,280 --> 00:36:24,450 We are [INAUDIBLE] and endless architects for not 460 00:36:24,450 --> 00:36:25,800 behaving more in public. 461 00:36:30,400 --> 00:36:37,450 I lived in Assisi for close to a year, measuring the whole town. 462 00:36:37,450 --> 00:36:39,880 This is a drawing, an axonometric 463 00:36:39,880 --> 00:36:44,807 based on my measurements, that some of the texture of part 464 00:36:44,807 --> 00:36:45,721 of the-- 465 00:36:45,721 --> 00:36:50,020 part of my purpose was after being at MIT 466 00:36:50,020 --> 00:36:52,900 as a student in teaching. 467 00:36:52,900 --> 00:36:58,300 I got a Rome Prize to study pedestrian movement 468 00:36:58,300 --> 00:37:00,825 in a small town. 469 00:37:00,825 --> 00:37:01,325 Next. 470 00:37:06,720 --> 00:37:09,210 This is the Piazza del Comune. 471 00:37:09,210 --> 00:37:12,570 And there's the measurements of pedestrian flow 472 00:37:12,570 --> 00:37:15,090 at different times of the day. 473 00:37:15,090 --> 00:37:17,160 One of the things that was interesting 474 00:37:17,160 --> 00:37:21,970 was that there was always this [INAUDIBLE] the Piazza del 475 00:37:21,970 --> 00:37:25,710 Comune is the central plaza of the town. 476 00:37:25,710 --> 00:37:27,315 Assisi's a linear town. 477 00:37:31,650 --> 00:37:35,520 I'll just turn on the light for a second, because-- 478 00:37:38,712 --> 00:37:42,060 oh, I'm afraid you have to-- it's 479 00:37:42,060 --> 00:37:45,840 got this mad system of turning it off in one place 480 00:37:45,840 --> 00:37:47,612 and turning it on in another place. 481 00:37:47,612 --> 00:37:50,384 [LAUGHTER] 482 00:37:52,232 --> 00:37:54,890 Assisi's on the slope of a hill. 483 00:38:08,640 --> 00:38:15,970 The town consists of a set of public spaces linked 484 00:38:15,970 --> 00:38:20,260 across the grain and along the contours, 485 00:38:20,260 --> 00:38:25,150 with a major Piazza del Comune in the center. 486 00:38:25,150 --> 00:38:29,410 Because the land use is distributed 487 00:38:29,410 --> 00:38:32,740 throughout the town, there's as much chance 488 00:38:32,740 --> 00:38:36,600 of there being a destination here as destination here. 489 00:38:41,460 --> 00:38:43,860 The volume of traffic moving this way 490 00:38:43,860 --> 00:38:46,050 through the center of the town is 491 00:38:46,050 --> 00:38:50,850 the same as the volume moving that way through the town. 492 00:38:50,850 --> 00:38:58,630 So the center of the town, in a very dense, 493 00:38:58,630 --> 00:39:07,960 [INAUDIBLE] kind of environment, is a combination of platforms 494 00:39:07,960 --> 00:39:11,200 at different steepnesses-- 495 00:39:11,200 --> 00:39:16,960 Piazza, with the San Rufino, Santa Chiara, San Francesco, 496 00:39:16,960 --> 00:39:22,840 and so on forming the basis for the organization of the town 497 00:39:22,840 --> 00:39:27,490 into parishes and into neighborhoods. 498 00:39:27,490 --> 00:39:31,870 But essentially, the meeting place 499 00:39:31,870 --> 00:39:36,760 is in a restricted town in the center. 500 00:39:36,760 --> 00:39:40,300 And serves both as a passthrough and as a place. 501 00:39:48,130 --> 00:39:51,370 The slide on the left is my crude attempt 502 00:39:51,370 --> 00:39:59,220 at time-lapse photography of a burial of a soldier 503 00:39:59,220 --> 00:40:00,940 in the central Plaza. 504 00:40:00,940 --> 00:40:01,440 Next. 505 00:40:08,420 --> 00:40:12,350 I stayed up in the tower above the Plaza 506 00:40:12,350 --> 00:40:15,950 for many hours of the day and night 507 00:40:15,950 --> 00:40:19,600 and was struck by the fact that, when there's 508 00:40:19,600 --> 00:40:23,470 nobody in the Plaza, [INAUDIBLE] [? years ?] of postmen 509 00:40:23,470 --> 00:40:29,410 delivering mail, it still seems very well inhabited, as 510 00:40:29,410 --> 00:40:32,680 opposed to when it was full with the crowd. 511 00:40:32,680 --> 00:40:34,985 It seemed appropriately sized. 512 00:40:34,985 --> 00:40:35,485 Next. 513 00:40:39,630 --> 00:40:47,220 Traditionally, the piazza, the Italian piazza, 514 00:40:47,220 --> 00:40:52,620 takes its form from a position of centrality or access, 515 00:40:52,620 --> 00:40:56,970 surrounded by dense housing environment, 516 00:40:56,970 --> 00:40:58,740 surrounded by a wall. 517 00:40:58,740 --> 00:41:01,590 This is a classic image of it. 518 00:41:01,590 --> 00:41:05,360 This plays out in different ways. 519 00:41:05,360 --> 00:41:08,510 As the town is a bit bigger than this one, 520 00:41:08,510 --> 00:41:12,140 this is Il Palio in Siena. 521 00:41:12,140 --> 00:41:22,650 Originally, it is a place for festivals and for animal games. 522 00:41:22,650 --> 00:41:23,150 Next. 523 00:41:26,770 --> 00:41:32,650 Now, it is a large open space which, twice a year, 524 00:41:32,650 --> 00:41:33,685 hosts a palio. 525 00:41:33,685 --> 00:41:38,290 And a palio is a kind of medieval reconstruction 526 00:41:38,290 --> 00:41:39,650 of a ritual. 527 00:41:39,650 --> 00:41:44,800 It's a game in which the various components of the town 528 00:41:44,800 --> 00:41:49,830 compete in a race. 529 00:41:49,830 --> 00:41:51,290 A lot of money is now gambled. 530 00:41:53,810 --> 00:41:58,430 On the right is an example of the use of public space 531 00:41:58,430 --> 00:42:00,320 for private use. 532 00:42:00,320 --> 00:42:04,280 This is very typical in the Italian open space, 533 00:42:04,280 --> 00:42:10,003 where land is leased from the public authority 534 00:42:10,003 --> 00:42:10,670 by the private-- 535 00:42:13,720 --> 00:42:15,545 in this case, a restaurant. 536 00:42:15,545 --> 00:42:16,045 Next. 537 00:42:19,210 --> 00:42:24,655 The palio takes place in the Piazza Del Campo here. 538 00:42:27,760 --> 00:42:31,290 There are other significant places in the town. 539 00:42:31,290 --> 00:42:41,710 Just above it is the great cathedral 540 00:42:41,710 --> 00:42:43,945 and medieval hospital. 541 00:42:48,180 --> 00:42:52,890 People have asked a lot about the emptiness of City Hall 542 00:42:52,890 --> 00:42:53,490 Plaza. 543 00:42:53,490 --> 00:42:56,100 And there are at least two theses 544 00:42:56,100 --> 00:43:00,900 which have been written about it and two competitions 545 00:43:00,900 --> 00:43:03,730 to do something about it. 546 00:43:03,730 --> 00:43:05,850 What is wrong with Boston City Hall Plaza? 547 00:43:10,360 --> 00:43:11,320 Say something. 548 00:43:11,320 --> 00:43:14,060 AUDIENCE: There's no real active [INAUDIBLE] 549 00:43:14,060 --> 00:43:15,932 JULIAN BEINART: There's no active what? 550 00:43:15,932 --> 00:43:18,890 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 551 00:43:18,890 --> 00:43:21,640 JULIAN BEINART: OK, there's no reason-- 552 00:43:21,640 --> 00:43:25,143 AUDIENCE: The [INAUDIBLE] 553 00:43:25,143 --> 00:43:25,935 JULIAN BEINART: Hm? 554 00:43:25,935 --> 00:43:28,870 AUDIENCE: The building [? is ?] [INAUDIBLE] 555 00:43:28,870 --> 00:43:30,940 JULIAN BEINART: The building is the problem? 556 00:43:30,940 --> 00:43:32,560 Why is the building a problem? 557 00:43:32,560 --> 00:43:35,710 AUDIENCE: [? It's ?] one part of the [? problem ?] [INAUDIBLE] 558 00:43:35,710 --> 00:43:38,020 JULIAN BEINART: OK, so we've got a couple of ideas. 559 00:43:38,020 --> 00:43:40,720 The one is there's not enough housing 560 00:43:40,720 --> 00:43:43,580 density around the square. 561 00:43:43,580 --> 00:43:45,480 That's probably a good observation. 562 00:43:48,300 --> 00:43:51,660 In a decentralized city, why do you need a central square? 563 00:43:56,030 --> 00:43:57,793 AUDIENCE: Stubbornness. 564 00:43:57,793 --> 00:43:59,210 JULIAN BEINART: Stubbornness, yes. 565 00:44:02,000 --> 00:44:08,300 Archivalness-- that this was a good idea historically, 566 00:44:08,300 --> 00:44:11,660 but it's misappropriated literally. 567 00:44:11,660 --> 00:44:13,850 It's taken out of another context 568 00:44:13,850 --> 00:44:16,640 and placed in one which doesn't serve it. 569 00:44:26,830 --> 00:44:31,780 There have been two attempts at solutions in competitions. 570 00:44:31,780 --> 00:44:33,500 The one is formal-- 571 00:44:33,500 --> 00:44:36,250 that is, to do something formally. 572 00:44:36,250 --> 00:44:41,050 One of them was to continue Hanover Street from the north 573 00:44:41,050 --> 00:44:46,450 end through the Plaza and to advocate 574 00:44:46,450 --> 00:44:49,660 some shopping along it. 575 00:44:49,660 --> 00:44:55,510 Others have proposed no formal intervention but only 576 00:44:55,510 --> 00:44:57,310 programmatic intervention. 577 00:44:57,310 --> 00:45:01,090 There's one famous one which puts a baseball 578 00:45:01,090 --> 00:45:03,180 diamond in the square. 579 00:45:07,960 --> 00:45:11,302 AUDIENCE: Also, I think the biggest difference is that, 580 00:45:11,302 --> 00:45:15,960 in Siena, the space is an interior space [? and ?] 581 00:45:15,960 --> 00:45:18,930 [? an outdoor ?] space [INAUDIBLE].. 582 00:45:18,930 --> 00:45:23,120 And here, the space just meets on [? the sides. ?] 583 00:45:23,120 --> 00:45:24,287 JULIAN BEINART: Well. 584 00:45:24,287 --> 00:45:26,120 AUDIENCE: [? Ties ?] [? into ?] [? scale. ?] 585 00:45:26,120 --> 00:45:35,070 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE] City Hall-- 586 00:45:35,070 --> 00:45:37,800 there's another tradition of open space 587 00:45:37,800 --> 00:45:39,480 which I'm not showing. 588 00:45:39,480 --> 00:45:43,650 That is the creation of open space in front 589 00:45:43,650 --> 00:45:45,560 of important buildings. 590 00:45:48,530 --> 00:45:53,630 In Assisi, there happen to be small open spaces, plazas, 591 00:45:53,630 --> 00:45:55,265 in front of each major church. 592 00:45:59,010 --> 00:46:04,920 This depends very much on the quality of the building 593 00:46:04,920 --> 00:46:08,700 that is being addressed and whether there's 594 00:46:08,700 --> 00:46:10,290 any real significance. 595 00:46:13,740 --> 00:46:16,980 In the Campo del Siena, the municipality 596 00:46:16,980 --> 00:46:21,960 has paintings from medieval times of the Comune. 597 00:46:21,960 --> 00:46:25,620 There's a sense that this place is somehow, 598 00:46:25,620 --> 00:46:30,690 to use a word from our first class, 599 00:46:30,690 --> 00:46:33,540 that it's somehow centered. 600 00:46:33,540 --> 00:46:37,410 I'm using a word from the cosmic model. 601 00:46:37,410 --> 00:46:45,240 Centeredness-- it's a metaphysical concept. 602 00:46:49,700 --> 00:46:53,450 In the case of the Campo, it is both-- and Assisi-- 603 00:46:53,450 --> 00:46:55,400 it is both-- I repeat myself-- 604 00:46:55,400 --> 00:47:01,520 it is both an important functional path to connect 605 00:47:01,520 --> 00:47:09,900 and also a place which can serve both small and large functions. 606 00:47:13,055 --> 00:47:13,555 Next. 607 00:47:18,480 --> 00:47:25,380 This is the underground of Rockefeller Center, 608 00:47:25,380 --> 00:47:31,740 the shopping mall and elevators and new roads and the rooftop 609 00:47:31,740 --> 00:47:35,490 condition, which was even considered 610 00:47:35,490 --> 00:47:42,471 to have aerial bridges above and recreation events on the roof. 611 00:47:42,471 --> 00:47:58,230 So in Rockefeller Center, there's 612 00:47:58,230 --> 00:48:00,750 public space below and above. 613 00:48:03,935 --> 00:48:04,435 Next. 614 00:48:14,880 --> 00:48:17,850 This is the largest-- 615 00:48:17,850 --> 00:48:20,880 probably, at its time, the largest private building 616 00:48:20,880 --> 00:48:23,920 development in history. 617 00:48:23,920 --> 00:48:29,860 I don't know about comparing it to the pyramids or whatever, 618 00:48:29,860 --> 00:48:33,640 but in modern times, certainly. 619 00:48:33,640 --> 00:48:38,950 It's part-- it's like Assisi. 620 00:48:38,950 --> 00:48:43,150 In Assisi, the square is part of the structure, 621 00:48:43,150 --> 00:48:46,690 the geometry of the whole town. 622 00:48:46,690 --> 00:48:53,090 In this case, it fits into a grid system, 623 00:48:53,090 --> 00:48:57,555 which it doesn't try to destroy, but actually adds roads. 624 00:49:01,120 --> 00:49:08,440 So it's adjacency to Fifth Avenue, plus it's surrounding 625 00:49:08,440 --> 00:49:12,550 of a high-density and high-income area, 626 00:49:12,550 --> 00:49:17,560 make this square, again, a functionally appropriate 627 00:49:17,560 --> 00:49:24,695 commodity, not an attempt to symbolize something. 628 00:49:24,695 --> 00:49:25,195 Next. 629 00:49:28,350 --> 00:49:36,050 Attempts to-- this is, on the left, 630 00:49:36,050 --> 00:49:41,310 a project called Urban Design Manhattan, some 25, 631 00:49:41,310 --> 00:49:46,340 30 years ago, by a group who tried 632 00:49:46,340 --> 00:49:49,490 to argue that the way to deal with Manhattan 633 00:49:49,490 --> 00:49:53,390 was to see it as a three-dimensional system 634 00:49:53,390 --> 00:49:57,950 with vertical connections private and horizontal 635 00:49:57,950 --> 00:49:59,000 connections public. 636 00:50:01,810 --> 00:50:04,690 The slide on the right is what you 637 00:50:04,690 --> 00:50:09,550 see of the sky at intersections in the grid 638 00:50:09,550 --> 00:50:12,940 [? down in ?] Manhattan. 639 00:50:12,940 --> 00:50:15,835 It's an attempt to argue that there 640 00:50:15,835 --> 00:50:23,545 is a logic to what you see in the sky between tall buildings. 641 00:50:23,545 --> 00:50:24,045 Next. 642 00:50:32,810 --> 00:50:38,210 The [? muteness ?] of the departed World Trade Center 643 00:50:38,210 --> 00:50:47,990 and the attempt in Shanghai to have completely private 644 00:50:47,990 --> 00:50:51,560 activity dominate the scene-- 645 00:50:54,750 --> 00:51:01,110 despite all of the attempts in the competition 646 00:51:01,110 --> 00:51:04,290 and the procedures of participation 647 00:51:04,290 --> 00:51:08,130 to replace the buildings on the left, 648 00:51:08,130 --> 00:51:09,660 the building which is has resulted 649 00:51:09,660 --> 00:51:14,400 is purely the result of the wishes of the Mr. Silverstein, 650 00:51:14,400 --> 00:51:15,850 the developer. 651 00:51:15,850 --> 00:51:16,350 Next. 652 00:51:21,680 --> 00:51:26,070 The tall building is a modern icon, 653 00:51:26,070 --> 00:51:30,980 which has often been seen as having perceptual value, 654 00:51:30,980 --> 00:51:35,510 much like a cathedral that dominated a medieval town. 655 00:51:35,510 --> 00:51:37,172 The tall building is the-- 656 00:51:41,300 --> 00:51:44,210 the attempts to make them taller and taller-- 657 00:51:44,210 --> 00:51:48,110 on the left is a building in Shanghai. 658 00:51:48,110 --> 00:51:55,010 On the right is Louis Kahn's attempt to design a [? much ?] 659 00:51:55,010 --> 00:51:57,525 [? lower ?] building in Philadelphia. 660 00:51:57,525 --> 00:51:58,025 Next. 661 00:52:02,190 --> 00:52:06,360 A Saudi bank building in Jeddah on the left and the attempt 662 00:52:06,360 --> 00:52:11,700 to make a tall building in Kuala Lumpur, on the left, 663 00:52:11,700 --> 00:52:14,940 as an Islamic building. 664 00:52:14,940 --> 00:52:19,985 An Islamic skyscraper is a paradox. 665 00:52:19,985 --> 00:52:20,485 Next. 666 00:52:24,590 --> 00:52:28,460 You've seen this project on the left. 667 00:52:28,460 --> 00:52:32,630 It's Melnikov's entry into the Pravda competition 668 00:52:32,630 --> 00:52:37,910 in St. Petersburg, with a rotating system. 669 00:52:37,910 --> 00:52:44,210 And on the right, the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition-- 670 00:52:44,210 --> 00:52:50,890 this is the entry by Adolf Loos, where-- 671 00:52:55,540 --> 00:53:00,815 it's difficult to explain in simple terms. 672 00:53:00,815 --> 00:53:04,025 But its obviousness is one of its powers. 673 00:53:06,910 --> 00:53:07,410 Next. 674 00:53:12,550 --> 00:53:18,390 [? There ?] is no legislation or design of the vertical ends 675 00:53:18,390 --> 00:53:22,890 of tall buildings as a system. 676 00:53:22,890 --> 00:53:28,920 I know of no city in the world which has an inventory. 677 00:53:28,920 --> 00:53:32,805 This is Houston on the right, Constantinople on the left. 678 00:53:36,250 --> 00:53:39,460 One might have thought that somebody 679 00:53:39,460 --> 00:53:43,000 would have had the idea that the geometry 680 00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:48,710 of the system of tall buildings would have some significance. 681 00:53:48,710 --> 00:53:51,130 But I don't know of any [? city-- ?] 682 00:53:51,130 --> 00:53:53,530 if you know of a city, tell me-- 683 00:53:53,530 --> 00:54:00,040 which controls the form of the system of tall buildings. 684 00:54:00,040 --> 00:54:03,820 It's seen as one of the things that 685 00:54:03,820 --> 00:54:07,830 is not necessary to control. 686 00:54:07,830 --> 00:54:13,100 It's interesting because it's seen, in many respects, 687 00:54:13,100 --> 00:54:15,800 when you have a river, and you have green space, 688 00:54:15,800 --> 00:54:18,500 you see the profile of the city from a distance. 689 00:54:21,110 --> 00:54:21,610 Next. 690 00:54:26,850 --> 00:54:34,455 Tall buildings are often used to project futurism. 691 00:54:34,455 --> 00:54:38,430 This is on the cover of an Archigram booklet 692 00:54:38,430 --> 00:54:42,510 on the right and a Wonder Stories book 693 00:54:42,510 --> 00:54:45,960 on the left, where the synchronicity 694 00:54:45,960 --> 00:54:49,470 of the transportation system creates 695 00:54:49,470 --> 00:54:51,835 the dynamic of the city. 696 00:54:51,835 --> 00:54:52,335 Next. 697 00:54:56,470 --> 00:54:59,470 There's another aspect, concealed aspect, 698 00:54:59,470 --> 00:55:07,780 of the city, much though its vertical shape is uncontrolled, 699 00:55:07,780 --> 00:55:15,970 so is below the level of the platform [INAUDIBLE].. 700 00:55:15,970 --> 00:55:25,690 This is a part view of the workings under Herald Square 701 00:55:25,690 --> 00:55:27,340 in New York. 702 00:55:27,340 --> 00:55:31,390 And on the right is a Diego Rivera drawing called 703 00:55:31,390 --> 00:55:38,800 Frozen Assets, which argues that under every city 704 00:55:38,800 --> 00:55:44,530 there are bodies locked up and dead bodies giving 705 00:55:44,530 --> 00:55:50,740 a kind of macabre picture of the use of the bottom. 706 00:55:50,740 --> 00:55:54,400 You'll remember a picture I showed you of travel 707 00:55:54,400 --> 00:55:58,510 in the sewers of Paris-- 708 00:55:58,510 --> 00:55:59,590 tourist trips. 709 00:56:02,405 --> 00:56:02,905 Next. 710 00:56:06,806 --> 00:56:12,120 [? Here ?] [? are ?] two examples in from Manhattan 711 00:56:12,120 --> 00:56:17,400 of the attempt by new office buildings, 712 00:56:17,400 --> 00:56:20,880 on the Lever Brothers on the left and the Ford Foundation 713 00:56:20,880 --> 00:56:23,770 on the right, to give the impression that 714 00:56:23,770 --> 00:56:26,790 they're creating public space. 715 00:56:26,790 --> 00:56:29,530 There's no market for the space underneath, 716 00:56:29,530 --> 00:56:34,770 as I tried to show in comparison to Fifth Avenue and Madison, 717 00:56:34,770 --> 00:56:38,130 or Fifth Avenue and Park. 718 00:56:38,130 --> 00:56:43,440 So it's very easy to give up the ground floor space in an office 719 00:56:43,440 --> 00:56:47,610 building, as it was easy for Seagrams Building 720 00:56:47,610 --> 00:56:51,150 to sit back in return for [? higher ?] bulk. 721 00:56:55,810 --> 00:56:58,855 There's no public space under a tower. 722 00:57:01,600 --> 00:57:06,900 Richard Sennett has written very critically of this device. 723 00:57:06,900 --> 00:57:12,730 The Ford Foundation puts a garden inside the building 724 00:57:12,730 --> 00:57:16,080 as if it's a public park. 725 00:57:16,080 --> 00:57:20,380 In fact, it very curtailed as to its entry. 726 00:57:20,380 --> 00:57:20,880 Next. 727 00:57:27,390 --> 00:57:34,040 Bank in Hong Kong, of course-- a famous bank where 728 00:57:34,040 --> 00:57:37,730 there's an attempt to give a sense of public 729 00:57:37,730 --> 00:57:40,250 in the interior. 730 00:57:40,250 --> 00:57:44,450 And the access to the interior is tightly controlled 731 00:57:44,450 --> 00:57:48,870 by a single escalator. 732 00:57:48,870 --> 00:57:52,430 The whole idea of this insinuation 733 00:57:52,430 --> 00:58:00,580 is that this represents a unification 734 00:58:00,580 --> 00:58:06,670 of the work that's being done in this vertical space. 735 00:58:06,670 --> 00:58:13,250 And yet each group works individually. 736 00:58:13,250 --> 00:58:13,750 Next. 737 00:58:16,650 --> 00:58:21,390 This is Herman Hertzberger's insurance company project 738 00:58:21,390 --> 00:58:23,010 in Amsterdam. 739 00:58:23,010 --> 00:58:28,230 No, no sorry-- it's not in Amsterdam. 740 00:58:28,230 --> 00:58:33,630 It's in-- I'll think of the name-- 741 00:58:33,630 --> 00:58:38,190 where each of the workers in this insurance company 742 00:58:38,190 --> 00:58:42,180 is allowed to personalize their own space. 743 00:58:42,180 --> 00:58:45,660 Yet the openness of the whole structure 744 00:58:45,660 --> 00:58:48,690 depicts a sense of community. 745 00:58:48,690 --> 00:58:52,100 This is the exterior of the system, 746 00:58:52,100 --> 00:58:58,010 whereby the system stops bluntly when it leaves the building. 747 00:58:58,010 --> 00:58:58,510 Next. 748 00:59:05,070 --> 00:59:08,280 This is where the conjunction of public and private 749 00:59:08,280 --> 00:59:12,610 becomes somewhat meaningless. 750 00:59:12,610 --> 00:59:15,840 On the right is Trump Tower. 751 00:59:15,840 --> 00:59:20,130 On the left is Citicorp, the ground floor of Citicorp, 752 00:59:20,130 --> 00:59:25,530 which has 20 stores and enormous things going on. 753 00:59:25,530 --> 00:59:28,950 Do you feel public in these animated spaces, which are 754 00:59:28,950 --> 00:59:33,720 intensely private ownership? 755 00:59:33,720 --> 00:59:42,450 Remember the matrix-- use, ownership, access, and meaning. 756 00:59:42,450 --> 00:59:47,640 And try always to use that matrix 757 00:59:47,640 --> 00:59:54,070 to test whether what is private and what is public about space. 758 00:59:54,070 --> 00:59:57,565 In this case, ownership is completely private. 759 00:59:57,565 --> 01:00:00,430 Access is public. 760 01:00:00,430 --> 01:00:06,130 Use is public, but probably oriented 761 01:00:06,130 --> 01:00:10,030 absolutely to private profit. 762 01:00:10,030 --> 01:00:14,710 And meaning is whatever you want to make of it. 763 01:00:14,710 --> 01:00:21,380 You can feel more public in the base 764 01:00:21,380 --> 01:00:25,970 of Citicorp Plaza, the new Citicorp Building, 765 01:00:25,970 --> 01:00:30,365 than you can in City Hall Plaza in Boston. 766 01:00:30,365 --> 01:00:30,865 Next. 767 01:00:36,710 --> 01:00:40,520 The attempt to shape tall buildings 768 01:00:40,520 --> 01:00:45,350 with elements of the decentralized city, 769 01:00:45,350 --> 01:00:48,080 both ecologically and-- 770 01:00:48,080 --> 01:00:50,775 it's a bit of a joke. 771 01:00:50,775 --> 01:00:51,275 Next. 772 01:00:55,440 --> 01:00:57,870 From the Wonder magazine diagrams, 773 01:00:57,870 --> 01:01:01,486 you get this intense-- 774 01:01:01,486 --> 01:01:05,280 there are many visions of Manhattan 775 01:01:05,280 --> 01:01:11,130 which are multiplications of traffic, 776 01:01:11,130 --> 01:01:14,820 suggesting that automobiles be on a different-- the trains 777 01:01:14,820 --> 01:01:18,820 on the lowest level, automobiles above, and including 778 01:01:18,820 --> 01:01:24,270 a rail system, public rail system, pedestrians on a level 779 01:01:24,270 --> 01:01:25,320 above. 780 01:01:25,320 --> 01:01:29,620 And many levels above there are pedestrians. 781 01:01:29,620 --> 01:01:34,890 This is an image of the modern city which is closeted 782 01:01:34,890 --> 01:01:37,860 in a lot of people's minds. 783 01:01:37,860 --> 01:01:41,574 It just doesn't happen. 784 01:01:41,574 --> 01:01:43,470 AUDIENCE: How much was this vision reinforced 785 01:01:43,470 --> 01:01:46,480 by Fritz Lang's Metropolis? 786 01:01:46,480 --> 01:01:47,980 JULIAN BEINART: A number of things-- 787 01:01:51,130 --> 01:01:57,010 I think Moses King, who did some of the most wonderful versions 788 01:01:57,010 --> 01:01:58,580 of this-- these are not King's-- 789 01:02:02,690 --> 01:02:06,410 portrayed a kind of utilitarian base to this. 790 01:02:06,410 --> 01:02:11,330 Manhattan was getting to be so dense and congested 791 01:02:11,330 --> 01:02:18,170 that the reaction was let's use vertical space to distinguish 792 01:02:18,170 --> 01:02:22,235 between vertical and horizontal movement. 793 01:02:27,750 --> 01:02:29,870 You can imagine movies being made. 794 01:02:29,870 --> 01:02:35,340 This is this is probably suitable for a Batman movie, 795 01:02:35,340 --> 01:02:38,280 extraordinary things are being-- supernatural events 796 01:02:38,280 --> 01:02:39,720 are taking place. 797 01:02:39,720 --> 01:02:41,910 There's something supernatural about people 798 01:02:41,910 --> 01:02:43,650 walking on the 20-- 799 01:02:43,650 --> 01:02:48,570 up in the sky on the 20th floor across from two buildings. 800 01:02:48,570 --> 01:02:56,970 The basic rule is that people are where there's reason to be. 801 01:02:56,970 --> 01:03:00,520 The number of people on the 20th floor of two office buildings 802 01:03:00,520 --> 01:03:04,290 is too few to generate any need for connection 803 01:03:04,290 --> 01:03:07,170 at that [? tower. ?] You come down the elevator, 804 01:03:07,170 --> 01:03:09,030 and you connect to the base. 805 01:03:09,030 --> 01:03:11,130 There are a few cities in the world 806 01:03:11,130 --> 01:03:15,351 which have developed enough density, nor do I-- 807 01:03:15,351 --> 01:03:19,410 I won't be around, but I don't project that there will ever 808 01:03:19,410 --> 01:03:22,710 be cities which will develop significantly 809 01:03:22,710 --> 01:03:25,860 upper-level pedestrian crossings. 810 01:03:29,840 --> 01:03:34,880 This contradicts much of the romance with this kind 811 01:03:34,880 --> 01:03:37,190 of world, of architects. 812 01:03:37,190 --> 01:03:44,720 Archigram was based on dense models of urban interaction, 813 01:03:44,720 --> 01:03:47,730 which seldom take place. 814 01:03:47,730 --> 01:03:52,150 That's why architects hate suburbia so much. 815 01:03:52,150 --> 01:03:54,922 That's a Catholic statement. 816 01:03:54,922 --> 01:03:56,200 [LAUGHTER] 817 01:03:56,200 --> 01:03:58,360 Next. 818 01:03:58,360 --> 01:03:58,860 Next. 819 01:04:05,600 --> 01:04:10,130 On the left is the marathon in New York and on the right 820 01:04:10,130 --> 01:04:16,310 there are celebrations after the hostages from Iran 821 01:04:16,310 --> 01:04:17,630 were released and returned. 822 01:04:27,610 --> 01:04:34,360 Archaic relied on space-time inventions such as rituals 823 01:04:34,360 --> 01:04:37,390 not only to mark space in particular ways, 824 01:04:37,390 --> 01:04:43,450 as you saw in the example of Madurai in Southern India. 825 01:04:43,450 --> 01:04:49,060 But in crude form, this is the same phenomenon, 826 01:04:49,060 --> 01:04:52,690 the bringing together of people in public 827 01:04:52,690 --> 01:04:56,990 to celebrate a particular thing-- 828 01:04:56,990 --> 01:05:00,250 in the case, a race, which has meaning which 829 01:05:00,250 --> 01:05:05,140 is meaningless, in the second, a celebration 830 01:05:05,140 --> 01:05:12,060 to return people after being captured by a foreign nation.