Regional and Urban Design Committee

  • 1.  Urban Design inside Buildings

    Posted 06-30-2015 11:31 AM

    How Offices, Schools and Restaurants benefit from Urban Design insideBuildings

    It has been said that Central Park is New York's "living room."  New technology firms and 21st century schools compete in creating collaborative workplaces forming "neighborhoods" connected by "streets" leading to "commons" or "town squares."  Flexibility and adaptability are king, blurring the lines made by walls until inside is out and outside is in. Nature is part of this game, first with buildings set in nature (the office park) and then with nature in buildings, like in the huge tent-like structure proposed by Bjarke Ingels (BIG) for Google in Mountainview. 
    It can be confusing to follow the many iterations of forms, from urban to suburban back to urban, from undesignated spaces to specialized spaces back to undesignated ones.  Closed offices open up, then fill with cubicles, then become open offices again.  We move from specialized classrooms to open classrooms, to flexible learning studios with moveable walls and learning streets.  Houses with rooms along hallways become open plan houses, combine to form McMansions with some of both, then collapsing into all-in-one micro units. 
    What does it tell us about the state of society, technology, planning and design if we use urban design terms to describe interior space arrangements and room names to describe urban design? 
    This article is an attempt of getting to some of the bigger developments that are behind the relationships described above and the terms we use to describe them. There appears to be little literature on this except for what is written about office, residential or school design specifically. Thus, my explanations about the suspected cause and effect for this new terminology and its relationship to societal trends remain anecdotal, speculative and explorative. 
    Uber design by SHoP ArchitectsThe building is designed as a kind of
    vertical city, divided into "neighborhoods" with a circulation spine on the
    Third Street side called "the Commons." [...] the idea is really that every
    neighborhood,every engineered neighborhood is connected to this
    interior street called the Commons."
    (Christopher Sharples, Principal SHoP Architects)


    The terms neighborhood, street, commons or community create associations with cities.  When evoked to describe the insides of office complexes, malls, and schools, one can assume that cities, urban "place-making" and the interaction of citizens in the use of urban spaces is supposed to serve as a model for organizing buildings.   What is it that makes it attractive to use urban planning terms for building design? What patterns and values encountered in the city do building designers aspire to? 
    In a time before the urban renaissance, workspace designers evoked the language of the...
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    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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