Rethinking the Role of Architecture in Public Spaces
Read about how architecture can enhance environments, improve qualities of life, and reshape communities through prioritizing the people and the places which they serve.
Devine Karas-Gonzalez | April 12, 2022
Architects are hired to design the places around us, whether it be our homes, places of work, or the essential businesses and services necessary to society. While the role of architecture is simple in terms, it is in practice that it becomes quite complex. Architects strive to design spaces which firstly are aesthetically pleasing, but more importantly to enhance the health, safety, and welfare of the people which they serve.
Architecture has consistently been evolving to reflect these changes in individual’s behaviors, styles, and beliefs. A necessity for sustainable and adaptive design has encouraged architects to design green buildings to reduce the negative effects of building construction on the environment. The result – a fast-paced movement, keen on rebuilding the image of cities to meet these standards in sustainable design.
As clean and sustainable technologies or – cleantech – are quickly becoming a normative solution to designing buildings, leaders of the cause primarily focus on how integrative design can enhance our environments. An integrative approach combines the expertise of all professionals on a project from the architects and engineers to the contractors and consultants, except it excludes the most common variable in every project, the community. Community integration is essential to achieving architectural excellence in public spaces. Then can the values, wants, and needs of the community be addressed in conjunction with the project’s initial goals to respectively embrace community goals as well as project owners.
The Power of Intention
Co-Op City, Bronx, New York: A Reflection of Poor Intentions in Design
Co-Op City is a remnant of a postwar period in New York City. As housing prices raised concern for many New Yorkers in the 1960s, major housing developments were necessary to provide affordable homes in the area. The development, large enough to be its own city, is now home to over 40,000 residents compiled into 35 densely packed high-rise towers.
The towers themselves describe a story of necessity. In response to this necessity to develop more affordable housing, the buildings are designed to be constructed in as cheap and efficient way as possible. Where this strategy had succeeded in one realm, providing the largest housing cooperative known in the world, it fails in every other aspect, risking occupants’ health, comfort, and safety.
If you have ever been to or even just driven past Co-Op City on the I-95, it is evident the intention was never in the best interest of the occupants. The power of intention in design is in realizing the potential for negative and positive development in communities. It should then be in our intentions to design spaces which respond to the people they serve, to encourage growth and prosperity in the community, and to prioritize the ways design can enhance people’s qualities of life rather than diminish it.
The Beacon at Garvies Point, Glen Cove, New York: Residential Complexes
The Beacon at Garvies Point, Glen Cove, New York: Public Recreational Spaces
The Beacon at Garvies Point is an example of how architecture and design can be used to enhance environments and give back to communities – when intended since the project’s conception. The building provides 167 units, a small step from Co-Op City’s 15,372 units. However, the project is unique in how it integrates the communities prior usage of the site as a docking area for boats as well as a viewpoint to the Hempstead Bay.
The project utilizes the previously underdeveloped grounds to provide a new life to Garvies Point in Glen Cove, Long Island – with 28 acres of landscaped spaces, a mile long waterfront walk, dog park and extra outdoor seating and program spaces. The site allows visitors to easily walk about the newly developed spaces while integrating an entire residential community within its core.
Considering the community into the project’s development, the new complex serves to equally enhance and regenerate the neighborhood to create a beautifully integrated space. Walkable pathways, greenspaces, act as simple boundaries between the private residential spaces and public recreational spaces allowing a seamless integration of users on the site. Flexible open spaces add to the bright new environment, supporting the growth and integration of community members as well as the new residents.
With meaningful connections to the nature and the surrounding community, The Beacon serves to demonstrate how a development can act to benefit and serve the community while simultaneously accomplishing the project owner’s goals too. Through intention in design, it is possible to establish places of residences which overlap with public recreation, thus providing communities the spaces they deserve and achieving a true positive momentum in urban planning and the development of the ‘sustainable city’.
A Framework for Designing Communities
Green buildings and sustainable design have transformed buildings into spaces which contribute to reducing the global carbon emissions, energy and waste, water, and promoting the use of safe local materials. With a goal for carbon neutrality by 2050, higher education institutions and college campuses have emerged as leaders in the movement for sustainability, demonstrating how buildings can empower people to enact change to restore environments and even reshape communities around us.
University buildings are often unique in their form and design, but also to demonstrate and teach people of the growing advancements in sustainability and benefits of using such technologies. The campus itself acts as a network for college students and staff, separating spaces with distinct pathways and open landscaped areas to encourage the connectivity of its occupants. Setting forth a framework for designing communities, we find that universities emerge as leaders in developing spaces which enhance the occupant health and comfort while providing connections to nature that reduce the negative impact on the environment.
Adelphi University, Garden City, New York
University of Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut
A New Design Process
The process of Integrative Design only requires that building teams collaborate to minimize the effect on the environment during construction and to enhance the performance of buildings afterwards. While this process is successful in contributing to the global goal for carbon neutrality, it fails to recognize the importance of community engagement if trying to accomplish a goal of such a scale.
Reworking the way that we design public spaces is essential to reflect the changes we’ve made as a society. In response to Covid-19 majority of our everyday services have moved to a digital and online platform to better serve the needs of the public. To respond to the changing needs of society and communities across the world, architects and designers must rethink how we address designing public spaces to contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions and enhancing the communities around us.
A Collaborative Design Process must ensure that the project team including the designers, engineers, and contractors are working together from day one, but also to include the people and the communities which they serve too. Collaborative Design must involve taking comments and suggestions from the public to decipher the communities wants and needs before making any major decisions.
Despite the major influence community involvement can have on a development, it is often something that can easily get overlooked during a project’s planning and design phases. Collaboration already exists on numerous projects between owners and design teams, however a singular channel for the communication between project owners and community members is integral to the growing success of new developments.
Collaborating with communities means to poll and interview residents and users of a space prior to its development to ensure the wants, needs, and respective ideas of the community can be heard and incorporated in a meaningful way to a project’s design. Encouraging community members to engage with project owners and developers is a key component to the success of the ‘sustainable city’ because without the support of the people they are serving; new developments are essentially just empty boxes.
