Undesignated Spaces

 

Photo by David Emrich on Unsplash

I am grateful when my free time is in short supply to be able to draw content for a blog post from SYNTHESIS, the textbook self-published by my college professor, the late Bill Kleinsasser (1929-2010). The following passage reprises many of the themes found throughout SYNTHESIS, including the importance of establishing opportunities for people, the ways architects should anticipate how buildings are used and experienced, and the virtues of “precisely ambiguous” spaces and places. Not everything we design should be so specific and precise in their conception that contingency and serendipity are unimaginable. Read on.

Opportunity for Spontaneity

Many important opportunities are established in built places by the inclusion and development of spaces for unspecified use. Until this century, architects usually sought them to extend and enrich the places they made. It is possible and desirable to develop these spaces just as carefully and just as deliberately as those intended for specified use. The clear definition and configuration of such spaces can produce long-lasting, often magical results.

Edge spaces, leftover spaces, and in-between spaces offer rich potential in terms of undesignated-ness. Linking spaces, large and small, and sometimes whole buildings, offer the same potentiality.

Undesignated spaces often: 

• Provide opportunity for retreat and withdrawal
• Provide opportunity for spontaneous interaction
• Provide spatial clarification by defining adjacent spaces (establishing articulation between them)
• Provide transition from space to space
• Provide an opportunity to pause (they are not for something or for someone to the same degree that other spaces are, so one may be in an undesignated space without invading or feeling forced to do something)
• Provide adaptability (since they have no set purpose, they are often available for unexpected purposes)
• Provide opportunity for detached participation (sometimes we need to be able to experience things first from a distance, so that we may decide how much we wish to commit to them)
• Provide opportunity to either join adjacent spaces or separate them

But “in-betweens” and “leftovers” can also be places that, because of their connective and unspecified nature, engage the imagination and nourish the soul. “In-betweens” may increase the complexity of places and allow them to be responsive to two sets of conditions at once.

Bay windows, sunny places, and layers may be useful as undesignated spaces

Balconies are almost always useful as undesignated spaces . . . and they almost always are magical.

Porches may be successful undesignated places, and they may become an important element in the texture of an entire community. 

Piazza dei Signori, Verona, Italy (photo by Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Undesignated spaces are unnecessary at the scale of neighborhoods and cities as well as houses. 

Bridges may be developed as “in-between” spaces at the city scale.

Edges of water and edges of streets as undesignated spaces.

Some places have relics of the past that may be developed as extremely evocative and accessible undesignated spaces.

There is a general need in our physical surroundings for a better balance between designated spaces (opportunity for specified uses) and undesignated spaces (opportunity for unspecified uses).