art in the public space lectures

today was a mega day and i'm pretty close to catatonic, but i thought i would just put up a few little notes:

beatriz maturana - urban designer

started off with an interesting discussion about the urbane, urban design and its theories and contradictions. considering that conversing with urban space and the design of that urbanity is going to be a huge chuck of what it means to be practicing in the public space, this lecture could have been broken up into two separate ones. in fact, i would have been quite taken with a whole dicussion about pavements/footpaths as signifiers - both aesthetically and then in terms of wayfinding. but hey.

other things i got:

elements of the city:
landmarks
paths
edges


from richard sennett:

design considerations:

appropriateness
legibility
robustness (which interestingly she discussed as a further process to flexibility of cities, an idea that mr hill mentioned)
personalisation (appropriation - different to appropriateness)

[and 3 others which i wrote down but left the trusty moleskine at uni]

open space
usually the absense of a building in the shape of a city block or other shape within the system of the city (court or circus), but something like fed square is completely different again. most were in consensus that FedSq could have been bad, but is now actually quite a good example of public open space.


cut short a discussion on what a good urban space is. and of course i had to tell everyone about the group that dan and russell set up: 'best urban spaces' flickr pool.