The act of moving in public spaces is bounded by architecture. The crowd reacts differently to this inflexible element depending on how it is articulated by green spaces, sculptural elements, infrastructure and programmes that are able to activate actions and behaviours. How does the crowd move? How is its movement directed in space? Which are the elements that build spatial sequences and narratives?
Chicago, Millennium Park, Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor (photograph, Mariana Siracusa)
By looking at the crowd through six case studies, each with a different history, culture and programme, I would like to point out characteristics that are paradigmatic of three different approaches to public space. Parc de la Villette in Paris and Millennium Park in Chicago are related by the presence of sculptural elements that act as visual episodes of a cinematic promenade and articulate the movement of people. Robson Square in Vancouver and the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro are examples of imposing architectural structures that allow little flexibility in the programme of events. Allahabad’s Sangam and Tahrir Square in Cairo are paradigmatic of voids, with little or no presence of structuring elements, that can be freely occupied by mass gatherings for events of exceptional character.
Sculptural elements
When Bernard Tschumi was designing Parc de la Villette in Paris in 1982, he wrote on the relations between space and event, activity and programme, actions that take place according to a timetable and are conceived following a specific choreography enclosed by well-designed spatial sequences. Architecture begins with movement and acquires meaning only through the use and misuse of its spaces. Using three superimposed grids of planes, lines and points, Tschumi gave structure and body to the organization of the park. As planes (grass fields and twelve thematic gardens) and lines (walkways and paths) remain almost invisible to the crowd, it is through the regular presence of architectural episodes that he named folies that the visitor experiences space.
Paris, Parc de la Villette, folies by Bernard Tschumi (photographs, Mariana Siracusa)
The twenty-six folies are designed through the fragmentation and deconstruction of a 12x12 m cube. The interior space is reduced to a minimum and each volume is differently articulated externally by stairs and ramps, galleries and runways, balconies and decks that allow the visitor to freely wander, climb and run across them. Colour assumes a strong communicative function, encouraging the visitors to approach the architecture as if it were a sculptural element. The red folies are visible from far away and the visitor can at first walk around them as if they were tutto tondo sculptures. Their architectural forms activate movement and actions. Visitors can see the park from different vantage points, not only from ground level but from 1m and 2m above.
Paris, Parc de la Villette, folie by Bernard Tschumi (photograph, Yanyang Zhou)
The folies, in their precise siting and in spite of their diversity of shapes, are stable “visual points” and the structuring element of this public space; other institutions in Parc de la Villette — Cité de la musique, Conservatoire de Paris, Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie as well as theatres and cinemas, restaurants and playgrounds for children — are irregularly placed around them. These buildings challenge the visitors through their interior spaces, but the architectural form of the exterior remains somehow opaque.
Paris, Parc de la Villette (drawing, Mariana Siracusa)
Millennium Park in Chicago, designed and built between 1987 and 2004, is the result of the substantial economic involvement of private citizens in the city’s cultural ventures, guaranteeing them a significant say in matters of design. The park’s 7000 seat bandshell was design by Frank Gehry at the insistence of Cindy Pritzker, Susan Crown chose Jaume Plensa for Crown Fountain and the Lurie Garden was named after Ann Lurie. The Millennium Park pieces are integrated into a wide public space delimited to the west and north by a backdrop of skyscrapers, to the south by the Art Institute of Chicago and to the east by Lake Michigan.
Chicago, Millennium Park, looking towards the Jay Pritzker Pavilion by Frank Gehry
(photograph, Mariana Siracusa)
Chicago, Millennium Park, looking towards the Art Institute's Modern Wing by Renzo Piano
(photograph, Mariana Siracusa)
If we view the whole project through the north-facing sculpture galleries of the Renzo Piano-designed extension to the museum, we see a continuity between the pieces inside the museum and those outside. The exterior works, of an urban scale and intended for a mass public, punctuate a space that would otherwise lack the structural qualities that construct sequences and activities. The sculptures in the open space of the park go beyond the aesthetic and contemplative function of those in the interior gallery space, where the visitors can rarely touch works of art. At the urban scale, the sculptures encourage behaviours that reflect on the quality of the park. The Fountain remains a sculpture but at the same time allows people to interact with water and invites children to play; Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor, is a sculpture that reflects the surrounding space and allows the many people that gather around it to play with their reflections on its mirrored surface. In both cases the visitor literally walks through the sculptures. The Pritzker pavilion and the BP Bridge by Gehry are not sculptures but their sculptural presence complements the works by Kapoor and Plensa.
Chicago, Millennium Park (drawing, Mariana Siracusa)
Both Parc de la Villette and Millennium Park are paradigmatic of a western approach to public space where design and planning are guided by leisure and cultural consumption. People gather in these spaces to be entertained. Recalling that the verb 'to entertain' comes from the Latin inter + tenere, meaning 'to hold together', we understand the fundamental role that deliberately placed sculpture and architecture have in holding together urban space, in providing activities, programmes and events for a large public, in giving rhythm to the interaction of people in space and securing those oblique, dynamic and flexible views and relations that make a lively place.
Imposing architecture
Arthur Erickson's Robson Square in Vancouver, completed between 1979 and 1983, is a three-block, multi-level structure that provides an inner-city pedestrian spine starting at the Vancouver Art Gallery and ending at the Law Courts. Erickson turned his attention to a heterogeneous public by imagining a series of activities that all have a presence in the exterior space: “Law, government and art would each benefit from proximity with the other, sharing a public image, public patronage and their own employees’ interactions. [...] With so many people gathering and passing by in their role of citizen, the whole reads like a new Forum Romanum.”
Vancouver, Robson Square, project by Arthur Erickson and Cornelia Oberlander
(photographs, Mariana Siracusa)
Every fragment of space invites a precise activity, and all activities are integrated in the project as a whole. A skating rink that extends below Robson Street connects the Vancouver Art Gallery to the central block. Restaurants, government offices and the University of British Columbia downtown campus are also at the lower level. Three cascading waterfalls and the landscape design by Cornelia Oberlander connect the central block to the Law Courts. The square’s concrete and landscaping are the structuring elements of the site. The idea that a green space can create a healthy pause in a frenzied city is an important element in the context of a spatial narrative. The civic value of the courthouse, on one side, and the cultural-educative value of the art gallery on the other, meet midway in a strategy that articulates different functions, reinforced by the integration of green space with architectonic space. As detailed as the structure is, very little is left to be reinterpreted by the action of visitors.
Vancouver, Robson Square (drawing, Mariana Siracusa)
Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome, designed and built by Oscar Niemeyer in only four months in 1983, has no green elements. Like Robson Square, it is a multi-purpose complex — an open-air cultural centre for 100,000 people and a public school for 16,000 students housed beneath its extensive bleachers. The Sambadrome is used for the Carnival parade. A symbol of Brazilian identity, the building replaces temporary festival structures in an attempt to structure the ritual of Carnival for tourists – a contradiction in an event historically based on popular participation. The new structure maintains a rigid segregation between participants and spectators, in contrast to the traditional fluidity of Carnival, and follows an orderly linear path that culminates in the Praça da Apoteose. The building controls and contains the once-typical chaos of Carnival, allowing for its commodification and commercialisation.
The unidirectional movement of the crowd informs the space. When architecture is present in all its structural and communicative force, as is often the case with the architecture of Niemeyer, it introduces into the city a certain element of rigidity that even a great variety of programmes is unable to break.
Rio de Janeiro, Sambadrome (drawing, Mariana Siracusa)
In both Robson Square and the Sambadrome the movements of the crowd are limited and controlled by design. These two reinforced concrete structures, the first articulated by various functions, the second dictated by a more simple programme, define people’s actions. This approach sees public space as addressing civic and cultural representation on one side and cultural consumption on the other.
Symbolic edges
In India, great attention is given to the social planning of the infrastructure at Allahabad's Sangam – the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythic and subterranean Saraswati – during the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage. The Allahabad Kumbh Mela takes place every twelve years during the winter when the rivers flow calmly, leaving wide sandy banks. A hundred million people come together over fifty-five days to bathe in the holy water of the rivers. Although the gathering has ancient origins, the first temporary city to house pilgrims was formally planned by the Town and Village Planning Department for the Kumbh Mela of 1954.
Allahabad, Kumbh Mela (photographer unknown)
Since then, a well-organised tent city has popped up each time on a thirty-two square kilometre site to accommodate the millions of pilgrims. The government focuses on three infrastructural elements: land allocation, streets and electricity. Everything else is left to the action of non-governmental organisations. The cyclical and temporary nature of the gathering (the site is submerged for most of the year) provides a tabula rasa, allowing a continual process of refinement. Architecture is completely absent and the success of the Kumbh Mela is a matter of hard and soft infrastructure put at the service of hospitality. The tent city is dismantled as soon as the crowd leaves. The main objective for the organizers is to allow the crowd to bathe. In Allahabad the action and movement of the people requires an empty space between the tent city and the river. The pilgrims face the holy water, the symbolic element of the ritual. In this space architecture is unnecessary.
Allahabad, Kumbh Mela (drawing, Mariana Siracusa)
Tahrir Square in Cairo is an accumulation of interstitial spaces that together form a trapezoidal void that is usually full of vehicular traffic. It is filled with people only in exceptional situations — for protests or demonstrations when the buildings that surround the square become targets. The Mogamma government building, the palace of Ahmed Khairy Pasha, the headquarters of the Arab League, Qasr Kamal al-Din (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, the palace of Prince Said Halim and the Hilton Nile Hotel, have come over time to represent the excesses of either the Egyptian governmental bureaucracy or the foreign governments who have attempted to influence the cultural and political identity of the country.
Cairo, Tahrir Square, February 9th, 2011 (photograph Jonathan Rashad)
During demonstrations the crowd faces and addresses the pertinent building in an attempt to establish a dialogue with the relevant political power. The protesters “reclaim the huge open space of the square as their own stage and use the extraordinary diversity of buildings around it – neoclassical, neo-Mamluk, historicist, modernist, totalitarian, and bureaucratic – as the backdrop to their forward-looking, digitally organised and recorded revolution.” This reclamation is possible because the visual and functional focus of this otherwise unstructured square is placed at the edge of the public space. In Tahrir Square we are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tightly controlled sequences of Robson Square, or the Sambadrome: the public in Tahrir Square takes over. It is in this 'open' space, devoid of elements of mediation capable of imposing a more complex narrative onto the urban void, that the voice of the crowd can effectively be heard.
Cairo, Tahrir Square (drawing, Mariana Siracusa)
Both Allahabad's Sangam and Tahrir Square are theatres of more-or-less organized occupation events. The civic action and involvement of the crowd that takes place in these public spaces remind us that squares and urban voids were created traditionally as civic forums.
We are left wondering if the fundamental civic and ritual functions that we see in Allahabad and Cairo could be articulated architecturally, just as the spaces devoted to leisure and cultural consumption are in the examples from western cities. And, on the other hand, should western cities rediscover the value of spaces where it is possible for the citizenry to express civic concerns, something that today, despite a few exceptions, is very much left to the action of media with little impact on urban spaces.
