On Edge in Jersey City

This video from last fall contrasts concepts of urban legibility found in Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City with animations taken from Google Earth’s version of Jersey City.  The juxtaposition attempts to reveal the effects of simulation on our understanding of cities and their navigation.  Google Earth, GPS, and other interactive simulations are changing the way we view the world.  While these technologies can transmit an abundance of information, one must think critically about the source and presentation of that information.  Lynch proposed that, in terms of urban navigation, legibility reduces anxiety.  A digitally mediated landscape offers new ways to read the physical environment, but what are we really seeing?




Standard Deviation

Inspired by the Common Ground seminar with Lebbeus Woods and Christoph a. Kumpusch, this post details another piece of pedestrian research.  Standard Deviation is a spatial experiment I conducted in April of this year.  While not strictly scientific or absolutely measurable, these kinds of installations may provide another means of understanding how people interact with architecture.  I hope to develop future experiments as a continuation of this design research.

Premise

When we travel along a path, what do we really see?  What do we need to see?  This experiment tests whether a pedestrian relies on the spatial bounds of path or on a surface pattern for their directionality.  A person tends to look down while walking, most likely for the practical purpose of placing their feet on safe, solid ground.  This experiment supposes that the average pedestrian disregards the overall geometry of a path in favor of the portion of pavement to be next tread upon. On a typical concrete sidewalk, a scoring pattern occurs approximately every 4’-6”.  These control joints are cut or formed at 90 degrees to the direction of the path, forming rectangular segments of an otherwise linear mass of pavement.  The walker may perceive the transverse lines as more important to their direction than the edges of the path.  If the pattern on the path no longer correlated to the extents or direction of the path, could a person be made to deviate from a given trajectory?

Experiment Format

The site for this experiment occurs at the north end of the Arts Quad at Cornell University.  It was chosen for its lack of scoring pattern on its asphalt surface and its adjacency to Sibley Hall, making it easier to record the experiment.  The secondary nature of the path ensured that most users would be able to experience the intervention without other pedestrians obscuring the pattern.  The pattern is accomplished with thin lines of black tape occurring every two feet on center.  The lines shift from perpendicular to the path at the ends of the pattern to 20 degrees off normal at the midpoint.  The pattern is the same in either direction, allowing users from either direction to experience the intervention in the same manner.  With the assumption that pedestrians in North America tend to walk on the right side of a path, the pattern is designed to subtly encourage users to veer to their left.

The experiment was recorded with video over the course of four hours on a Thursday morning while class was in session.  Due to the location on the north end of campus, more users moved from north to south as they made their way to class or work.  Because the black tape had a similar reflectance as the pavement, most users did not notice the intervention until just before entering the pattern.  Once on top of the pattern, the black tape contrasted well with the grey asphalt.  Over the course of the experiment, the some segments of tape had to be repaired or replaced, but in general, the course was unoccupied by the project author and assistants.  No person stopped walking to investigate or tamper with the tape.  In general, most users did not appear to consciously notice the pattern, although their path through the intervention might indicate otherwise.

Results

The results of this experiment suggest that about 35 percent of users deviated from a normal trajectory based on the pattern intervention.  The correction of this deviation lends to the credibility of this claim, showing that the pedestrian had intended to walk in a particular direction, but was taken astray by the intervention.  The relative success of this intervention suggests that pedestrians are susceptible to taking directional clues from pattern over spatial extents.  Perhaps we must amend Merleau-Ponty’s assertion to say that, while the human mind possesses a perceptual genius to see what is not there, it also operates with perceptual naiveté, assuming geometrical qualities of space that may not be present.

The proportionally higher number of deviation in the north-bound direction may possibly be explained by the slight hill that the path climbs as one moves from south to north. Due to the angle of the ground plane, the pedestrian walking down the hill may be able to see farther in from of him, while the one walking up the hill may focus more on the ground in front of him.

Common Ground

The last semester of Cornell’s Master of Architecture II program is underway in Manhattan.  In addition to a studio led by Rob Rogers and Jonathan Marvel, we are taking a seminar reexamining Colin Rowe’s Collage City.  Mark Morris leads the seminar with modules by guests Chris Otto, Lebbeus Woods and Christoph Kumpusch, Kathy Battista, Mary Woods, and Henry Richardson.  The module by Woods and Kumpusch was titled Common Ground, a reference to the streets and walkways all New Yorkers share.  After a lecture on drawing by Professor Woods, our group was tasked with individually documenting a piece of common ground, writing a commentary about our findings, and creating an analog or representation of the ideas discovered in the process.  Based on my exploration of a piece of granite curb in Greenwich Village, I became interested in the function of thresholds in the city, which seem to create spatial boundaries that must be negotiated by pedestrians.  Here is my piece of Common Ground:

The Site

Commentary

In Greenwich Village, a tired hunk of granite subtly marks the threshold between sidewalk and street.  Its corners worn smooth from a century of utility, the stone takes on a more natural geometry than its original sharp lines and perfect bullnose.  Long gone is the evidence of its excavation, fabrication, and installation.  It appears to have always existed in this spot, maintaining a stoic order in a city of chaos.  Even the yellow paint applied by a union roadway line painter has all but faded from the pocked surface of the curb.  A small shift in elevation—maybe three inches—is complemented by a distinct change in pavement to denote the edge.  The line of curb acts a seam, tenuously stitching together the fabric of equally old paving stones and a contemporary concrete walk.  Compared the smoothness of the concrete, the street surface is a topography unto itself, a warped grid of canyons and gullies.  As the stones slowly wear, the spaces in between them gradually collect the residue of the city.  Yes, the street sweepers, both manual and mechanical, do their best to collect the refuse, but still, tiny pieces of urban life nestle themselves in the depressions between pavers.  This microcosmic index reads like a guestbook of activity: a cigarette filter flicked into the street when no ashtray was readily encountered; a dead leaf, the victim of a late spring frost, the fragmented remains of an earlier concrete walk.  The current walk, in its broom-brushed consistency, resists the collection of debris, save for the myriad of irregular, black splotches that dot its surface.  One wonders if hundreds of individuals spat their gum onto the ground at this very point or if a local office manager, always eating too many onions with her lunch salad, habitually deposits her sticky breath freshener on the same patch of sidewalk on the route back to work.  The gum spots hold fast to the sidewalk while the cigarettes all end up on the street, thus maintaining the separation of roadway and walkway, at least in terms of oral fixation products.  A traffic sign rising above the pavement echoes the function of the granite curb with diagrammatic clarity.  The pedestrian, forced off the stone edge by its thinness and irregularity, must chose a side, but presses on toward thousands of urban thresholds left to cross.

Threshold/Boundary Drawings

Exhibition

The culmination of the Common Ground module was an exhibition of our projects, held at Cornell’s 17th Street studio on June 24th, 2009.  Guest discussants included Miodrag Mitrasinovic (Parsons), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Anthony Titus (Cooper Union), and Mark Morris (Cornell).  The exhibition proved a very meaningful way to summarize and reflect upon the ideas and work produced in our nine day sprint.  I was pleasantly surprised by the daring and depth found in many of my colleagues’ work.  Despite the vast differences in approach, the common effort for the exhibition brought a tighter sense of studio community, which should help us finish our program with verve.

Discussion of Thresholds (photograph by Brook Moyse)

Viewing the Work

Group Discussion (photograph by Brook Moyse)

Installation View

Dowel Detail