Making a Place:

Bridging the Physical and the Poetic

The range of people involved in creating environmentsfrom urban planners to architects to
designers and finally to usersmakes up a pretty large group. All of them, especially those who get
paid for it, can find an abundance of technical information to guide them. After the reinforced
concrete or the fabric flammability code is mastered, however, the professional as well as the new
occupant is left with the challenge of creating, or perhaps maintaining, the special character of a
place.
A new field of study, called "placemaking," explores this other half of planning environments. People
in many fields contribute to the discussiondesigners, architects, planners, philosophers, and
writersand their lines of thought are as varied as their disciplines.
Placemaking
Like designing itself, placemaking is not easy to describe, but here is a beginning: It is the creative
act of defining an enjoyable, comfortable, supportive, and meaningful environment. Placemaking
studies the delicate relationship between the surroundings and the psyche, the way in which the
physical world of buildings and tables relates to the realm of the inhabitant's "civic, poetic, and
emotional life." 1 While the subject is very far from being a formal discipline, it is like a link joining
a varied group of people who approach the same subject in their own ways.
The problem of making a meaningful place is at least as old as architecture itself, but in 1960 a
planner named Kevin Lynch began to examine our experience of a place in a new way. Then, before
the ubiquity of the shopping mall, he observed that "we need an environment which is not simply
well organized, but poetic and symbolic as well. It should speak of the individuals and their complex
society, of their aspirations and their historical tradition, of the natural setting, and of the
complicated functions and movements of the. . .world. . . . Such a sense of place in itself enhances
every human activity that occurs there. . . ." 2
For Jeffrey Scherer, an architect who studies it, "Placemaking is a concept that bridges the mental
and physical aspects of place." Its concerns cross that span: How much daylight is available, or how
much light from Times Square's neon signs? How much fresh air? What can you smell? How much
space is free for communal interaction or for being alone? Is the space identifiably of its region? Can
you see the horizon? Where does the light from the sunset fall? What can you hear?
The problem
Many observers have chronicled the costs of bad environments to our culture. For Kent Bloomer and
Charles Moore, authors of Body, Memory, and Architecture, "The great blank horrors of our public
environment are the spaces that belong to no one, that are neither private nor public, neither
comfortable nor inspiring nor even safe, the no-places that erode the public realm." 3 They go on to
complain: "What is missing from our dwellings today are the potential transactions between body,
imagination, and environment. . . . Comfort is confused with the absence of sensation. The norm
has become rooms maintained at a constant temperature without any verticality or outlook or
sunshine or breeze or discernible source of heat or center or, alas, meaning." 4 In 1990, Tony Hiss's
book The Experience of Place brought many of these issues to public attention. He begged us to
reconsider the significance of place, writing: "It's simultaneous perception [of our environment] that
allows any of us a direct sense of continuing membership in our communities, and our regions, and
the fellowship of all living creatures." 5
These communal values contrast with those of Puritanism and architectural Modernism, the
intertwined philosophies that have helped to define much of the environment we inhabit today. Part
of the wonderful original revolution of modernist architecture withered, over time, into a vestigial
design tic, whereby environments change from meaningful places into mere spaces; that is, in the
intellectual process of analyzing a design, it became more abstract and moved away from the users'
needs, away from its roots in a local context or earlier purpose, and toward an impersonal aesthetic
goal. The problem of Puritanism, on the other hand, belongs not just to the architect but to society
at large, where we secretly harbor the conviction that discomfort is good for our souls. 6 This stoic
undercurrent whispers to us that beauty, character, and comfort are expendable luxuries; and it
influences, with bottom-line logic, most of our business decisions.
Hiss argues against this puritanical rejection: "Far from constituting a kind of backdrop that we can

ignore at willas long as it permits us to see and breathe adequatelysuch things as the kind of
light around us, the chemical composition of the air, and arrangements of rooms, hallways, and
staircases affect not only physical health and mental grasp and agility but our sense of humanity's
pressing problems and unfinished business." 7
It can be argued that that very concept of "utilitarian" itself, related as it is to both our Puritanism
and our Modernism, is uniquely responsible for our loss of place. This concept offers the possibility
of a stark design solution stripped of any other kind of communication, any other human elements.
If, as other cultures more often do, we did not entertain the notion of "utilitarian"removed the
concept from our vocabularythe kinds of environments we might create would become much
richer. Our stoicism allows us to conceive of "utilitarian" versus "indulgent" as moralistic opposites.
Without having to choose between the two, the ways of solving the problems of providing space for
people, whether public or private, become more complex and more rewarding.
The problem touches every scale
The problem of place in the city was a subject in a 1988 talk at Simon Frazer University delivered by
the writer Ralph Caplan. He said that he jumps to his feet when his plane lands not because he likes
the town, or is especially happy to have arrived in one piece, but because he is "relieved to be
someplace after being no place. But that sense of relief is always premature. It vanishes in the
airport, because when you're in an airport, you're still no place." He goes on to observe that in
Seattle or Vancouver "the feeling of nowhereness is dissipated during the drive into town, but that
is not true everywhere." Often now, even the old buildings of a city, which "carry the culture and
the identity" of the place, are filled with designer cappuccino and quiche shops that are
interchangeable. "Yet one of the principal uses of design is the articulation of difference. Design is
both a way of making distinctions and a way of eliminating distinctions that are not useful."
In Out of Place, Michael Hough's book on placemaking in regional planning, he chose the story of a
Herman Miller plant near Atlanta to show how development can contribute to the continuity of the
regional landscape without jeopardizing the land's identity. When the company bought it, the plant
site was a productive farm of 135 acres. The finished project left 41 acres remaining in production,
maintained livestock with grazing areas and hay-growing areas, and kept the site's forest land
standing. Two existing ponds were also kept that provided water for the livestock, contained various
species of fish, and attracted wildlife and migrating birds, as well as "providing visual
enhancement." It was an example, Hough said, of "how contemporary change, far from creating
placelessness, can provide an opportunity for diversity and a continuing, though modified,
landscape identity." In addition, unlike typical industrial developments, this "represents a process of
evolution and continuity, one that derives benefit from and contributes to the land it occupies." 8
We zoom to a smaller-scale question of place in an observation by Jeffrey Scherer who, explaining
the significance of place in an office, said: "If you had a chair and a table in the middle of a 50-by50-foot space, and you were asked to do your work, you wouldn't feel a connection to the
architecture. You'd feel vulnerable. Your eye would wander, you'd feel a lack of sense of control
over your space." 9 Though Scherer's remark is hypothetical, his point concerns our relationship to
place on an intimate scale. Many of the concerns of placemaking remain the same through changes
in scale, from the farm to the desktop.
What constitutes place?
Interconnectedness
A simple and profound aspect of place is our reciprocal relationship with our environments: Not only
do we change them, but they change us aswell. 10 We are linked to the places in our lives; where
we live and work defines us, and we in turn are quick to personalize and define the places we use.
"Our relationship with places," writes Hiss, "is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not
remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think." 11
We are so joined to the places we inhabit that our very intimacy can be invisible. "A cathedral, a
prison cell, a village square, a hospital roomany space that comforts or challenges or moves us
deeplyis so resolutely a place that it requires of us an effort of mind to think of it, like every
space, as a bounded expanse, even as a child of five is not easily convinced that its mother is also
simply a woman," 12 writes Michael Mooney, a scholar of places.
Difficult definition
Adding to the elusive intensity of our connection to our environment is that it is hard for most of us

to know what exactly a good place isthat is, we know one when we experience one, but it is
difficult to figure out how it gets that way. Designer Bill Stumpf has noticed that people, when they
move into a house, spend a while moving the furniture around, without knowing what they want.
When they get to a certain position, it feels O.K., and they stop. 13 In his more academic way, the
planner Kevin Lynch observed in his studies that people's images of dystopia (the opposite of
utopia) are clear and exacteveryone knows a bad placewhile the image of utopia is generalized
and vague. Just think how uncertain a proposition heaven is in contrast to the color, temperature,
population density, and kinds of activity we know to avoid in "the other place."
Extension of our selves
Paradoxically, even if we can't describe our connections to a place, we all maintain them anyway,
and in an intimate way. For Caplan a personally important place "has a measure of you in it." Bill
Stumpf includes places as kinds of containers he calls an "exoskeleton memory." These would
ascend in order from one's wallet, to pocket, to briefcase, to car, to desk, to office, to house, then
perhaps to neighborhood. We depend on these as vessels to hold our memories and our metaphoric
as well as real place in the world. Our place in society, after all, is established by the contents of our
wallets, where cards identify us and confirm our links to others.
In this sense, the word insideness takes on two meanings, says Michael Brill of the Buffalo
Organization for Social and Technological Innovation, Inc. On the one hand, if the place in question
is a building, it is possible, of course, to be inside it. But insideness also describes the sense of
belonging that a known place communicates to a person; it makes that person an insider in the best
sense. 14 In this way, the larger place where we work or live confirms our belonging as much as a
library or credit card. Stumpf tells the story of a museum curator whom he asked about her
preferred places to work; she said that she would never want to do her work outside the museum,
because it gave her such joy to walk through the collections she worked on every day.
"Emotional ergonomics"
Abundant scientific studies provide us with rationales for what common sense already knows: The
pituitary gland receives sunlight directly through our eyes, and so now we know that humans need
sunlight; the small-air ions occurring naturally in fresh air by lakes and rivers make people alertso
we need fresh air, too.
As an example of how important these qualities of place are, Stumpf points out that everyone, on
entering a hotel room, goes first to see what the view is. The fact that this precedes learning how
comfortable the bed is has its parallel in the office space, where, he has observed, despite all the
attention devoted to it, people would trade all their hydraulically adjustable furniture for a place
next to a window. 15 Caplan tells the story of a designer named Rick Penney who complained that,
despite all the beautiful advantages his interior designs offered clients, they still all wanted daylight
and open windows. When he heard this, Penney mused about the lasting problem of "emotional
ergonomics." 16 The hidden purpose of the scientific studies may be to quantify these obvious
virtues so that they too will have a place on the sheet that tallies the bottom line.
Time
Another aspect of attachment to place is, of course, familiarity with it. The shock in returning to
one's hometown is in finding that time has changed it. 17 Conversely, much of the drama in a
cathedral lies in the air of stability and of enduring grandeur it conveys. There is a complex interplay
of time in the sense of place. As any Eastern European knows, even a map is only the record of a
place for a certain moment. A scholar attending a seminar called Commonplaces went so far as to
argue that "Place is the name for space/time"; 18 in other words, since the thing that distinguishes
a place from a space is our experience of it, and since we experience places only in finite moments,
the term "place" must only describe a particular moment in a particular space.
Dynamic aspect
If one is striving to bring a sense of place to a planned environment, this fluid definition of place in
time may seem frustrating, and yet it is the very open-ended aspect of the Herman Miller site, for
instance, that Michael Hough so praised. That dynamic aspect is a valuable quality of a place: both
a dynamic relationship to the environment and a dynamic relationship to the inhabitants.
"Placemaking can start with a chair; then as it expands, things get more fixed. Under what
conditions can an environment retain flexibility and discovery for someone? How can one build an
open-ended system so that the responsibility is given back to the individual?" 19 asks Michael
Rotondi, dean of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Approaches to making a place

Among the qualities of place we have discussed, the only one that is not very abstract is the
practical concern with light and air. Small wonder then that economic values often define our
environments: They are easier to understand! Placemaking's goal is described here, again by
Bloomer and Moore: "We will care increasingly for our buildings if there is some meaningful order in
them; . . .if we can actually inhabit them, their spaces, taking them as our own in satisfying ways;
if we can establish connections in them with what we know and believe and think; if we can share
our occupancy with others, our family, our group, or our city; and, importantly, if there is some
sense of human drama, of transport, of tension, or of collision of forces, so that the involvement
endures." 20
Conceptual preparation
The difficult part in the design of a place is to really know what role it has for the people who will
use it. For Rotondi this is a process of trying to "figure out how to leave things alonehow to work
with the existing conditions and develop reciprocity between the building and the city. The thing is
to travel light, to develop a new kind of understanding of all the conditions, and to develop a new
skill of seeing the conceptual connectedness between the project and the environment." 21
Michael Hough, like Rotondi, is more philosophical in his approach. "The making of memorable
places involves principles of evolving natural process and change over time. It involves economy of
means where often the less one does to make purposeful change the better....It also has to do with
understanding the nature of places as a precursor to making purposeful change, which is a far more
significant act of creativity than imposing prepackaged solutions on the land. The familiar and
overworked analogy of the Eskimo carver who, staring at the stone in his hand, wonders what it is
within that wants to come out, serves to encapsulate the underlying philosophy of what place is all
about. When the carver recognizes what it is, he simply carves the stone to release it." 22
The soul of placemaking, it is becoming clear, is a poetic one, and so requires a gentle approach. A
1992 article in Places, a journal of environmental design, may have described the most extreme
example of this. It told the story of the restoration of a Chinese village to its Ming-era (1368 1644) and Quing-era (1644-1911) appearance. In the Chinese language, characters are ideograms,
each representing a thought or thing or quality. On this basis, buildings surrounding the town's
central stream were restored not to rigid specifications or to historical drawings, but to a sequence
of experiences in traveling the river: "a north-bound boat ride will provide, for example, a sense of
sheltering security, loosening delight, enclosing comfort and anticipating excitement...." 23
Brass tacks
One usually has somewhat more prosaic constraints. How, then, to proceed? Clearly, as every hotel
room's brass lamp and bedroom wallpaper demonstrate, placemaking cannot be done by recipe.
Nevertheless, a few good sources of advice do exist.
The Journal Places is dedicated to this subject
Though it tends to cover the macro-architecture of urban planning, as we have pointed out, many of
the same issues are relevant in different scales. Therefore, despite their intended application to a
public plaza, many of the (39) "Questions to Ask a Space" offered in a piece by Ronald Lee Fleming
can be widely used.
Does the space have a complexity that allows it to be enjoyed by a variety of users? Conversely, is
it simple enough to be memorable as an integral space? 24
Does the space reduce the impact of the visual cacophony of its surroundings? Conversely, does the
space strengthen a vocabulary of design elements that are used (or could be used) appropriately
throughout the surrounding area?
Do the intricacies in the space sustain interest; are they worth considering five or six times?
Are there design features in the space that the community could add to over time?
Are there elements of continuity that reinforce the overall design character of the space and
establish a pattern that is discernible by pedestrians, not only from a bird's- eye view?

Can you hear special sounds in the space: the rustle of leaves, the thud of horseshoes, the trickle of
water, or the music of a band?
Do the works of art in the space have meanings that are accessible to the general public?" 25
Another source of more hands-on advice is Michael Brill, an architect and the president of BOSTI.
His firm has published a booklet titled The Office as a Tool, in which he provides suggestions for
office planning. Some of them are as follows:
"Provide a stable framework which also accommodates change. People thrive best where there is a
balance between stability and change.
Design to help integrate worklife and 'life-life': One of the characteristics of high-performing staff is
that there is no clear demarcation between their life at work and their lives in general.
Subdivide floorplates into understandable 'places':
There is a kind of psychic oppression people have with a large number of near-identical
workstations in a large area. In such a situation, the whole place feels like 'no-place.'
Consider giving the space at the window to everybody, by using it as a main circulation, with access
to a band of services and amenities across from the window wall.
Design each workgroup so that it is recognized as a separate 'place.'
Create a center for each workgroup and for each neighbourhood: There should be a place for
behaviors which are part of work but not its core, like the coffee break.
Recognize people in the streets: To reduce feelings of anonymity and increase the sense of
community and feelings of security, no corridor should be longer than about 65 feet, which is the
maximum distance at which people's faces can be recognized." 26
Conclusion
As our world becomes more complex, more populated, and more built, it also becomes more
important for us to sustain ourselves in supportive communities. We have seen that the kind of
environments we create are integrally connected to that sense of community. Though it is the more
difficult half left after technical problems have been solved, the task of placemaking is also the most
enriching and culturally important part of defining a space.
REFERENCES
1 Black, et al, eds., Commonplaces: Essays on the Nature of Place (University Press of America,
New York, 1989), p. ii.
2 Lynch, K., The Image of the City (The M.I.T. Press, London, 1960), p. 119.
3 Bloomer, K., and C. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (Yale University Press, London,
1977), p. 84.
4 Bloomer and Moore, p. 105.
5 Hiss, T., The Experience of Place (Knopf, New York, 1990), p. xiii.
6 Kaufman, K., "Finding Comfort at Work," Magazine (Herman Miller, Inc., Zeeland, Michigan,
1988), p. 3.
7 Hiss, p. 9.
8 Hough, M., Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape (Yale University Press,
London, 1990), pp. 147-148.

9 Kaufman, p. 6.
10 Brill, M., unpublished interview, October 8, 1992.
11 Hiss, p. xi-xii.
12 Mooney, Michael, "Being There: Forms of Space and Time," Commonplaces: Essays on the
Nature of Place, Black, et al, eds. (University Press of America, New York, 1989), p. 13.
13 Stumpf, W., unpublished interview, November 9, 1992.
14 Brill, M., unpublished draft, Archetypes as a "Natural Language" for Place-making, October,
1992.
15 Stumpf, interview.
16 Caplan, Ralph, unpublished interview, October 30, 1992.
17 Caplan, interview.
18 Flay, Joseph, "Place and Places," Commonplaces: Essays on the Nature of Place, Black, et al,
eds. (University Press of America, New York, 1989), p. 2.
19 Rotondi, M., unpublished interview, November 5, 1992.
20 Bloomer and Moore, p. 106.
21 Rotondi, interview.
22 Hough, pp. 210-211.
23 Wang, Joseph, "A Chinese Village in Transformation," Places (Summer, 1992), p. 21.
24 The issue of complexity mentioned here is one that reappears in much writing on this subject.
Complexity is essential to perhaps the most simple definition of a place: a spot that we can
distinguish from others. This echoes design's purpose as Caplan described it earlier: "Design is both
a way of making distinctions and a way of eliminating distinctions that are not useful."
25 Fleming, Ronald, "Questions to Ask a Space," Places (Summer, 1990), pp. 12-13.
26 Brill, M., The Office as a Tool (Teknion, Inc.), pp. 29-31.