Unfinished Thresholds Experimenting with Public Building's Agency in Hybrid Cultural Building re-design

Design Factors for Cultural Building Activation

Finding the Common Ground between Public Space Theory and Architectural Practice

Cultural Public Buildings as Public Space Containers

Public buildings are the physical container of the public sphere and therefore embody social constructs. To understand how design could affect a building’s agency one must attempt to understand their entanglement with society. The theoretical notions presented by philosophers or sociologists are rarely absorbed into public space design. However, a better understanding of how public life would enhance design’s impact and improve urban environments.

The current doctoral research project aims to fill the observed knowledge gaps in the translation of public life theory to public building design practice through spatial experiments showing how to activate the public sphere agency of cultural buildings in deprived contexts. Given their power to catalyse collective meanings, cultural buildings are taken as a paradigmatic example of public buildings (fig.1). Museums, libraries, theatres, or music halls host the spatial collective negotiation and definition of art, literature, music or heritage. For this reason, testing public life theories on their grounds will allow extrapolating the findings to other programmed public spaces. The translation of abstract notions into specific spatial interventions will ground the theory and make it more accessible to mainstream design practice, eventually initiating dialogues between public space theory and building design practice that could contribute to better living environments.

Connecting Theory and Practice

With the final objective to test research hypothesis in spatial experiments, this exploration began with building a theoretical review on public life and analysing existing reference projects with remarkable effects on it. The lessons learned and knowledge gaps found between public space theory and design practice formed the research hypotheses that were tested in the experimental case study of makerspaces in Libraries.

Theoretical review. Conditions of Publicity: to Be or to Appear

Common knowledge often assumes that public buildings are all buildings publicly funded. This definition is partial and dated. Our current era is characterized by what Bauman called liquid modernity where the only constant changes, reference points are always shifting and so do the limits between the public and private. What now is an office could become a gallery in a few hours. Public space floods and retreats from all areas of life physical and digital life.1 Therefore, public buildings are those permanently or temporarily engaged in the public sphere. To be active in the public sphere, public buildings need to fulfil the following conditions:

• Visibility: appear in the public sphere.
• Accessibility: open to be used by citizens.
• Relevance: connected to an existing need in the community.
• Affordance: allowing for clear and independent use.

Lacking one or multiple of these conditions will result in underuse, civic rejection, exclusion or even disappearance. This is even more so in cultural buildings because they are intrinsically connected with our collective practices. Taking the example of a traditional cultural building such as the museum­ shows how important these conditions are. First, the museum should be visible (physically and/or digitally) and usable for the community otherwise, it will not be used and therefore not be active in the public sphere. If people are not aware that it exists and they can access it, they will not visit it. Then, the museum content must be relevant to its community. For example, a marine museum in an alpine area will most likely not incite thriving public life. And lastly, the museum needs to offer a clear affordance while leaving space for independent use. Users should understand how they can interact with the content and others.

Although all public buildings have some effect on the public sphere, only the ones intentionally designed taking their contribution to public life into account have a controlled positive impact on their environment.

Project reference analysis. Making room for public life - SESC Pompéia

An example of a successful public building design for public life is SESC Pompéia, by Lina Bo Bardi. This cultural centre –including library, sports facilities, theatre and restaurant– is a renovated factory in the middle of Sao Paulo that stands as an urban oasis. It is a lively space where people feel entitled to intervene in it that has survived the passage of time. From observing public life in and around it, one can extract the following factors:

• Threshold: Blurring of the interior-exterior dichotomy. The street gets extended into the cultural grounds connecting to the urban fabric.
• Liminality: Clear accesses and transitions between functions.
• Identity: wayfinding and colour as design tools.
• Indeterminacy. Making space for possibilities beyond the programmed.
• Unfinished: Avoiding a smooth appearance can motivate interaction and spatial negotiation.

The previous design factors clearly show an intention to make room for public life by avoiding design over-determination. Identifying and scrutinizing these design factors helps form hypotheses about how design decisions can impact public life that has been experimented with in the MAKERLAB project of makerspaces in libraries.

Case study. Makerspaces in libraries.

In the United States, Denmark or the Netherlands libraries are shifting from knowledge consumption to knowledge production spaces. The implementation of spaces for citizens to invent, create or produce –makerspaces– has proven to revive the social importance of libraries by approaching it to different social groups such as children, the elderly, the unemployed or migrants. Yet, the spatial implications of hybridising libraries were not fully explored. The first case study of this design-driven doctoral research is makerspaces in libraries as a top-down approach to cultural institution reactivation through programmatic hybridization.

During a year-long collaboration with the National Library of the Netherlands, the researcher-designer worked with four pilot libraries aspiring to define, implement, and build a makerspace. Using design methodologies, the research has explored what are the spatial factors influencing a hybridising process aiming to contribute to public life. Working simultaneously with four pilot libraries endowed the research with many opportunities to test the hypotheses of the design factors affecting public life. In particular, the case of Bibliotheek Gorredijk presented important learnings on the unexplored potential of spatial interventions to activate the agency of public buildings. The case study design process followed the following steps: observation, analysis, workshops, interview, drawing and prototyping (fig.2).

When presented with the challenge to introduce a new programme in a cultural building – in the current case of makerspaces in libraries – the first step is to assess the existing situation. Furthermore, to produce socially relevant spaces, design must draw on collective intelligence. One cannot design for a community without the community. Therefore, the case study design departed with a co-creation process involving the library’s employees, users and partner organization in group workshops. The insights from the workshops combined with the researchers’ observations and analysis formed spatial advice or “blueprint” with an emphasis on strengthening the makerspace’s public condition. The blueprint intended to provide spatial advice rather than a final design by proposing a layout for the most relevant functions to activate the makerspace’s agency in a library (instruction, design, making, showing and storing) (fig.3). Through co-creation, the blueprint transformed into a series of proposals for spatial interventions incorporating the design factors observed in the project reference analysis –threshold, liminality, identity, indeterminacy, unfinished– aiming at activating the makerspace’s agency within the library and the city (fig.4-5).

The traditional architectural design approach to activating the public conditions tends to be reductionist. Visibility is reduced to its physical connotations and solved by abundant use of glass. Yet, for public buildings to be effectively engaged in public life they should appear in the public sphere and become part of the public opinion both physically and digitally. When designing accessibility, architecture tends to make direct connexions—ramps, door, glass facades—yet the liminality process of moving from a private individual to engaging in public life requires a more complex approach. The same goes for publicity (branding, communication, identity) which is expected to fall under the communications department’s responsibilities overlooking its ethico-esthetical relevance. Lastly, while public buildings' success is closely related to their programming, overdetermined spaces restrict their use and do not last the test of time. Finding a balance between indeterminacy and clarity provided space for interaction, ownership and community forming.

Making Coffee as an Act of Public Life

Results

After acceptance by the library’s organisation, a part of the given spatial advice was implemented (fig.6):

• On the one hand, the makerspace location shifted closer to the building's façade and the villages' high street increasing its visibility and presence in the public sphere.
• Hanging posters in and around the library with one-liners about what a makerspace is raised awareness about its existence and made it visible in a non-literal way.
• Selecting machinery and activities that were relevant to the community such as mug sublimation or historical model making ensured for a quick space appropriation by the community.
• Placing another access to the building closer to the makerspace gave it an “own address” and eventual independent use.
• Placing a curtain around its perimeter allowed for the makerspace to either blend into the library and the public sphere or enclose itself, becoming a threshold of publicity.
• A modular table allowed for different settings improving the space flexibility and some level of indeterminacy.
• Placing the machinery (3D printer, laser cutter, sublimation) and shelves containing the products of making facing the street to present an affordance raised interest and motivated eventual participation.
• Considering interior furnishing as part of public space blurred the indoor-outdoor division and enlarged the public sphere threshold, the boundary of public life.
• The interior finishes were purposedly left unfinished, to incite action and spatial ownership.

The most interesting part of experimental design-driven research is that –because it is based on real contexts– it can deploy unexpectedly. Letting go of rationalist conceptual overdetermination and embracing empirical “multiplicity”–or the uniqueness and interconnective complexity of all things–2, architectural design can provide fruitful solutions for contemporary wicked problems. When observing the finished interventions in Gorredijk, the biggest spatial success was one beyond architectural knowledge: they had placed a coffee machine in the middle of the makerspace.

Sometimes the only design intervention necessary to attract public life is a coffee machine. While visibility, accessibility, connection, or independence are fundamental for a cultural program to work, the spark often resides in a very humble gesture, like offering free coffee. The trigger of placing a familiar affordance –a coffee machine– within an area of unknown possibilities –machines and tools for manual creation– was proven to be a successful strategy to introduce new public life capacities. And it showed how much it is for architecture to learn from observing public life.

Conclusions and recommendations

The realized experiments confirmed that publicity is conditioned by some variables –visibility, accessibility, relevance, and affordance– and that these conditions can influence public life through design factors such as thresholds, liminality, identity, indeterminacy or unfinished. Recognizing these factors as applicable to architectural design practice enlarges and deepens the understanding of the connection between public building design and public life. Demystifying what is often analysed "a posteriori" once a cultural building is in use, extracting public life factors and incorporating them into the architectural design tool kit is extremely relevant for intentional civic design.3

The spatial interventions proposed for the makerspace in Bibliotheek Gorredijk attempted to expand the understanding of what architectural design can do for public life. Shifting the focus of design practice from only aesthetics to ethic-aesthetics matters, the proposals attempted to activate the space departing from exploring public needs and not a priori program requirements. In the makerspace case study it became clear that to influence public life through the introduction of a new programme, a different set of architectural skills are needed. The role of the designer-architect made room for the mediator-, the facilitator-, the advertiser-, the activist-, the artist- or the consultant-architect. Being a public architect for the common good challenges mainstream savoir-faire.

Since Makerlab project where the makerspace case studies are embedded is a two-year project that is based on prototyping, observation, and iteration. The learnings of the rounds will inform the spatial experiments to come. In particular, the topic of liminality – or the passage from private individuals to engaging in public life– was not extensively tested in this round. Testing liminality in space could provide answers to how the threshold of publicity is enabled around public buildings. In general terms, the main recommendation for further or new research in architectural design public life is to embrace reality in its complexity. Sometimes design focuses on changing reality instead of using it to “create conditions and provide possibilities”.4

When designing public buildings, architects are not designing an object but an embodiment of society. Thus beyond their ordinary tools and skills – drawing, modelling, constructing – they must embrace the responsibility of designing how humans live together and interact. To do so, it is important to understand how human interaction – public life – works and what are the design factors affecting it. These factors are often intangible and exceed what is understood as "architectural knowledge". In other words, to find the common ground between architectural practice and public space theory there needs to be an expansion in what is considered architectural design skills. And yes, sometimes that might imply placing a coffee machine.