Marinus de Beer

Getting to know a public spaceThesis outlineThe thesis will be the result of countless of experiments and field-research. In these experiments and field-researches I will examine public areas to learn about their qualities.

Research will go hand in hand with talking to inhabitants/frequent users of a public space, will be about testing my assumptions (instead of just having those assumptions) and it will be about finding out what function the local government has played in the design of the square, and what my function can be in all of this,

The goal is to learn and recognize the indicators and signs of a certain quality a space owns, and additionally will be turned in a quest to finding an answer to what I discover.

Every place has it’s own challenges, and by my own way of looking at things, and using my personal way of criticizing, I will attempt to propose new solutions for these areas.

InvolvementFor now my research has been focused on the city of Haarlem, I am making contact with people who are very familiar in the city and ask them about ‘what they think’ of certain areas. I already have been interviewing a lot of people on certain locations to ask why they choose to be at that specific spot.

I notice that it is very, -very- important to ask a question the right way. The thesis will be a journey, not only about discovering and learning space, but also about developing on other areas such as asking questions the right way.

During my researches I found out that some people aren’t very aware of why they sit where, is this because they simply accept the factual being of a place since it is created and designed by the local government (because the local government is seen as an ‘official’ party and therefor are -probably- knowing what they are doing)?

By asking further and further, you discover hidden or sometimes obvious qualities, and by doing research on the same space more than once on different moments of the day, you will find out that the atmosphere in a space can be completely different for example at night. Places that seem like a void during the day can be a space of solace for someone at night. If you want piece, it’s nicer to sit in the dark and watch a well-lit area.

Not just lookingWhen you diagnose a space, there are many different ways of doing it. You can sit and observe like a rock somewhere along the coast of France, just looking at the tide rolling in and watch a crab feasting on some shrimp. Or you can move around, initiate contact with others, be proactive, and try to ‘become the user’.

My client would be the space, this envelopes the physical space, the atmosphere, the passerby, the local government but first and foremost: the user.

There are some common and classic mistakes, cases of tunnel-vision often lead to a space becoming unfriendly towards their frequent users because the group that makes decisions is not personally involved with that certain public space and can only react to things they hear from the users, in which case this information becomes abstract. I don’t believe in supermultifunctionally designed public spaces, and it shouldn’t be like that, for every space has it’s own purpose and function. We have the power to discover and reveal what that function could be (read carefully now, ‘could be’, and not ‘should be’, we can only propose and should never be patronizing about it).

Below there is a series of images of a space that I found rather intriguing. I was biking through a neighborhood one day, in the distance I saw a triangular shaped field in the middle of three roads crossing each other. In the middle was a full and high bush, this felt awfully crowded to me and I wondered why this was.As I got closer to these bushes, and when I passed it, I noticed some sort of elephant-path leading up into the center. So I got off of my bike and went to check it out. The images will further explain what I discovered, a beautiful hidden place, filled with fantasy, it was like a little easter-egg, a gem, or a gold nugget.

After making my discovery, I went around and asked people that lived there, for example, an elderly lady who just had her grandchildren for a visit, about this little secret space. When I told her about this space, she had no idea and I had to point it out to her and explain what was there to be seen. She didn’t know about it and said it was probably done by the neighbors’ kids.

Things like this astound me, when she exits the house, she basically walks right up to the bushes where the secret space finds itself. How can she not know about it?

I had a space like this when I was young, and when I told other people about this secret space, they told me they had a similar space when they were young.

Nowadays it has become a trend to remove (some see it as ‘improve’) places that trigger the fantasy, any place where there might be any danger and excitement found, is replaced with just plain obvious structures. ‘Here is a place where you can climb on this child-safe construction with completely regulated wooden and metal beams’, ‘and here you can sit and watch -this- view’. I want to get stung by a thorny bush every once in a while.

‘Here you can sit and get tired of the brickwork and completely misplaced stone columns underneath this statue and contemplate suicide by drowning in this 1-foot deep, sorry-excuse-for-a-fountain’

- There is absolutely nothing that justifies the existence of this particular fountain on this particular square

The double benchAh, there it is, the double bench, something similar to what I had designed myself some time ago in a small doodle on the side of a notebook.Sometimes architects (are they called architects?), put a double bench somewhere, as if they are saying: ‘Look, you can sit here, and you can sit there’.

It consecutively disappoints me when only one side of the bench has a view, and the other side is staring at the wall of a building that had some kind of weird glass-decoration because the architect had a wet dream about mermaids and then believed he had to turn this into a design. (Okay, I’m not sure if this is the case, but it sure looks like that!).

Project connected to thesis

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”(Jack Nicholson as Jack in The Shining, 1980 by Stanley Kubrick)

The thesis will eventually serve me as a guide to produce what will become an intervention in Public Space.

This will most likely go towards the design of furniture, but might as well be a complete overhaul of a space. This partially depends on the outcome of the thesis (that I do not know at this time). But my personal interest is leaning more towards adding a new layer to a space in the direction of public furniture.

I want to serve the user with my work, and turn my findings for my thesis into real-world matter. This will be in parallel with the writing of my thesis since my way of researching is for a big part doing life-scale tests.

Let’s finish with a picture of a hedgehog that became a friend for 10 minutes while I was on one of my many excursions through suburbia.

- Marinus de Beer (September 27, 2014)