Haini, Lin
06/09/2015
There are many different and interesting observations to be making from the readings. In an Experience of Place, Tony Hiss argues about how “simultaneous perception” will influence the feeling of people who are standing in a public place. In The Death and Life of Great American Cites, Jane Jacobs asserts that the trust between neighborhood and the city you live in is built by using the sidewalk. Last but not least, in A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander, he claims that a regular public place can be used or changed into another vantage spot.
According to An Experience of Place, Written by Tony Hiss, he contends that our surroundings and simultaneous perception might affect people’s feelings. In a very busy and great place as Grand Central Terminal, you might feel that yourself are minuteness when you stand in the center of this place. You might also feel you don’t know where you should look, and where you should go. Additionally, assuming that every single person surrounding you is doing the same thing, you might feel strange if you don’t do it. In Tony Hiss’s book, he mentions: “I felt hurried along. My breathing was shallow and slightly constricted; my neck and shoulders were tight.”1 In my opinion, it means that Tony Hiss get affect by this crowed environment. The rushed people make him has feel hurried. The congested Grand Central Terminal also makes him nervous and too tight to stay in there. When I walk inside of the New York Public Library, the environment and the people surrounded me also affected me a lot. People who walked across me were so slow and quite, it made me think about that I should do the same. Because the New York Public Library is also a magnificent place; the history and style of this library also gave me the same feeling when Tony Hiss was standing in Grand Center Terminal. I felt I was tiny too.
According to Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great Americans Cites, Jane It is important to use or share the sidewalk, because the sidewalk is the bridge of building the trust between neighborhoods. Jacobs asserts that “the trust of a city street was formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.”2 For me it gives me a feeling that a person who lives in a big city is hard to trust one another. However, the sidewalk is built to be shared with neighborhoods or other strangers, and let people start to have a collective area instead of every single area is private. If you don’t even trust one another, how are you supposed to share with them. Most people said that the city is unmerciful, and the people who live in the city are more hardhearted. I believe this is because of the society gives us a lot of pressures and computations, and only allows people to think about what “belongs to me”, The City pushes people and makes us become more selfish. However, if we share a sidewalk, we take responsible for it as a group, and then I believe everything will become different. We may start to think about each other, and try to find the advantages for each other. For example, my uncle used to complain about the sidewalk between his house and his neighborhood’s house. He said that it was not his responsible to cleaned the sidewalk and make it better. The reason was because his neighbor used to put garbage bags on the sidewalk. It made my uncle very angry, so he decided to leave all the responsibility to his neighbor. However, after my uncle’s children started to play with his neighbor’s kid, my uncle thought he needed to make this sidewalk more clean and useful for kids to play. Therefore, he made a deal with his neighbor that each of them will clean the sidewalk twice a week and my uncle also added a basketball stands for their kids to play nearby the sidewalk. Until now, my uncle and his neighbor still have a real good friendship.
In the book A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander, he argues that there are some public places that can be adjusted or changed into other different attractive points. In today’s society, more and more people have started to focus on having a healthy life. As this reason, New York City constitutes The City Bike. It allows people who live in the city disentangle from the crowed subway station and untie from the car traffic which never straightway. Furthermore, it offers a chance for people to really enjoy the city life, and whenever they feel tired they can take a rest in any public area. Thus, Christopher Alexander claims, “In any public place where people loiter, add a few steps at the edges where stairs come down or where there is a change of level. Make these raised areas immediately accessible from below, so that people may congregate and sit to watch to goings-on.”3 It gives a condition for people to rest and saunter around the city. For example, once I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and saw a lot of people who sat on the stairs. It reminded me of the Bryant Park that there is a lot of chairs have been put in one side. Personally, it looks in a mess. It might be nice and orderly if there are some stairs like The Metropolitan Museum of Art for people to comfortably sit with in the Bryan Park. In the movies named Urbanized film by Gary Hustwit also gives an example about change an old useless railroad into a very beautiful outdoor passage.4 It not only save the space, but also change a useless place into a vantage point.
There are some of the interesting observations from Tony Hiss’s the Experience of Place, which argues about the environment and how the simultaneous perception will influence people’s feeling; from Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, claims about the sidewalk brings people trust; and from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, he argues about the public place can be changed or adjusted into a different vantage point. Those three observations elicit people’s thinking of the space and the thing we need to do for our society and environment as a human being.
End Note
1.Tony Hiss, The Experience Of Place (New York: Alfred A, Knopf 1990) 6.
2.Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books Edition, December 1992), 57.
3.Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University Press 1977). 605
4.Urbanized, documentary film, directed by Gary Hustwit (2011; United States)
http://www.hustwit.com/category/urbanized/
Bibliography
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books Edition, December 1992), 57.
Hiss, Tony. The Experience Of Place. New York: Alfred A, Knopf 1990.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books Edition, December 1992.
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press 1977.
Urbanized. Documentary film. Directed by Gary Hustwit. United States, 2011.
http://www.hustwit.com/category/urbanized/
