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I conceive that land belongs for use to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless members are still unborn.
—a Nigerian tribesman
Parks are dead and artificial. Farms, when treated as private property, rob the people of their natural biological heritage—the countryside from which they came.
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| Property is theft |
In Norway, England, Austria, it is commonly understood that people have a right to picnic in farmland, and walk and play— provided they respect the animals and crops. And the reverse is also true—there is no wilderness which is abandoned to its own processes—even the mountainsides are terraced, mown, and grazed and cared for.
We may summarize these ideas by saying that there is only one kind of nonurban land—the countryside. There are no parks;
parties. Indeed, when he talks about the outdoors, he seldom means his garden. He does not think of gardens as potential living space. . . . Like the parlor of our grandmothers, the garden is an object of excessive care. Like the parlor, it is not meant to be lived in. In an age that puts a premium on usefulness this is most irregular. Paradoxical though it may sound, the use of glass walls in recent years alienated the garden. Even the “picture window,” as the domestic version of the show-window is called, has contributed to the estrangement between indoors and outdoors; the garden has become a spectator garden.
The historical concept of the house-garden is entirely different. Domestic gardens as we have known them through the centuries were valued mostly for their habitableness and privacy, two qualities that are conspicuously absent in contemporary gardens. Privacy, so little in demand these days, was indispensable to people with a taste for dignified living. The house-gardens of antiquity furnish us, even in their fragmentary and dilapidated state, perfect examples of how a diminutive and apparently negligible quantity of land can, with some ingenuity, be transformed into an oasis of delight. Miniature gardens though they were, they had all the ingredients of a happy environment.
These gardens were an essential part of the house; they were, mind you, contained 'within the house. One can best describe them as rooms without ceilings. They were true outdoor living rooms, and invariably regarded as such by their inhabitants. The wall- and floor-materials of Roman gardens, for example, were no less lavish than those used in the interior part of the house. The combined use of stone mosaic, marble slabs, stucco reliefs, mural decorations from the simplest geometric patterns to the most elaborate murals established a mood particularly favorable to spiritual composure. As for the ceiling, there was always the sky in its hundred moods. (PP- 157-59)
An outdoor space becomes a special outdoor room when it is well enclosed with walls of the building, walls of foliage, columns, trellis, and sky; and when the outdoor room, together with an indoor space, forms a virtually continuous living area.
Here are several examples of outdoor rooms. Each one uses a different combination of elements to establish its enclosure; each one is related to its building in a slightly different way. Ru-dofsky gives many other examples in the book we have cited. For instance, he describes how a front lawn can be rebuilt to become an outdoor room.
. . . every building has rooms where people stay and live and talk together—common areas at the heart (129), farmhouse kitchen (139), sequence of sitting spaces (142). Whenever possible, these rooms need to be embellished by a further “room” outdoors. This kind of outdoor room also helps to form a part of any public outdoor room (69), half-hidden garden (111), private terrace on the steet (140), or sunny place (161).
A garden is the place for lying in the grass, swinging, croquet, growing flowers, throwing a ball for the dog. But there is another way of being outdoors: and its needs are not met by the garden at all.
For some moods, some times of day, some kinds of friendship, people need a place to eat, to sit in formal clothes, to drink, to talk together, to be still, and yet outdoors.
They need an outdoor room, a literal outdoor room—a partly enclosed space, outdoors, but enough like a room so that people behave there as they do in rooms, but with the added beauties of the sun, and wind, and smells, and rustling leaves, and crickets.
This need occurs everywhere. It is hardly too much to say that every building needs an outdoor room attached to it, between it and the garden; and more, that many of the special places in a garden—sunny places, terraces, gazebos—need to be made as outdoor rooms, as well.
The inspiration for this pattern comes from Bernard Ru-dofsky’s chapter, “The Conditioned Outdoor Room,” in Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford Press, 1955).
In a superbly layed out house-garden, one ought to be able to work and sleep, cook and eat, play and loaf. No doubt, this sounds specious to the confirmed indoor dweller and needs elaboration.
As a rule, the inhabitant of our climate makes no sallies into his immediate surroundings. His farthest outpost is the screened porch. The garden—if there is one—remains unoccupied between garden
This outdoor room is formed, most often, by free standing columns—column place (226), walls—garden wall (173), low sitting walls (243), perhaps a trellis overhead—trel-lised walk (174), or a translucent canvas awning—canvas roofs (244), and a ground surface which helps to provide connection to the earth (168). Like any other room, for its construction start with the shape of indoor space ( i 91) and structure FOLLOW SOCIAL SPACES (205) . . . .
| 164 STREET WINDOWS* |
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. . . wherever there are green streets (51), small public SQUARES (61), PEDESTRIAN STREETS (lOO), BUILDING THOROUGHFARES (101)—in short, any streets with people in them, these streets will only come to life if they are helped to do so by the people looking out on them, hanging out of windows, laughing, shouting, whistling.
♦J*
A street without windows is blind and frightening. And it is equally uncomfortable to be in a house which bounds a public street with no window at all on the street.
The street window provides a unique kind of connection between the life inside buildings and the street. Franz Kafka wrote a short commentary entitled “The Street Window,” which expresses beautifully the power of this relationship.
Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere, whoever, according to changes in the time of day, the weather, the state of his business, and the like, suddenly wishes to see any arm at all to which he might cling—he will not be able to manage for long without a window looking onto the street. And if he is in the mood of not desiring anything and only goes to his window sill a tired man, with eyes turning from his public to heaven and back again, not wanting to look out and having thrown his head up a little, even then the horses below will draw him down into their train of wagons and tumult, and so at last into the human harmony. (Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken Books, 1972, p. 384).